Who We Are:
HandsOn Jacksonville is the on-ramp to volunteering on Florida’s First Coast. We inspire, equip and mobilize people to take action that changes the world.

What We Do:
By working with hundreds of local nonprofit organizations, we help people discover their power to make positive change in our community.

While we mobilize volunteers each day of the year to assist with the needs of nonprofit agencies, we also observe national days of service, such as Martin Luther King, Jr. Day of Service by offering a wide variety of community service projects and meeting many pressing community needs. Last January, we managed 7 different projects in honor of Martin Luther King, Jr. Day of Service. These included a fire prevention and disaster preparedness community event in an impoverished neighborhood, building community gardens, helping at the Habijax Restore and the Teacher Supply Depot, as well as beach and park cleanups.

At HandsOn Jacksonville, we value and embrace diversity in a number of ways. One of our signature programs is Blueprint for Leadership which prepares a diverse group of leaders to serve on boards of directors of community nonprofit organizations. This helps ensure that there is representations of all cultures and races at the leadership level of nonprofits.

Each year in December volunteers stuff backsacks with books and toys to deliver to elementary school students in challenged (Title 1) schools in A Visit from St. Nicholas. In 2011 30,000 books and 30,000 toys were delivered to 6,500 kids in 14 local schools. For some, these were the only gifts they received during the holiday season, and the first books they have ever called their very own.

Through The Hope Fund, HandsOn Jacksonville works with The Florida Times-Union newspaper and the University of North Florida to tell the stories of our local residents in need and raise funds to meet the most basic needs of families in crisis. In 2011, we raised $120,288 to assist these families.

For a healthy way to raise funds, HandsOn Jacksonville offers The Human Race as a risk-free, cost-free fundraiser for nonprofit and community groups. This fun 5K race is held in October at The St. Johns Town Center. Participating organizations may be designated ½ of each runner's fee in addition to utilizing the race as a platform to solicit funds to sponsor their causes.

Our Story:
Founded in 1969 as Volunteer Jacksonville, HandsOn Jacksonville is the community thought leader on volunteering and “the place” to go to find volunteer opportunities. We served for many years as a broker to mobilize volunteers to local nonprofit organizations who needed them.

In 2008, we became a full affiliate of The HandsOn Network and rebranded ourselves as HandsOn Jacksonville. This reflected a shift in the way we did business – embracing a proactive project management model, where we recruit the volunteer staffing and resource, manage, and execute the project through the help of our staff and volunteer project leaders.

In addition to our adult project leaders, we also develop youth to lead community service projects through our Youth Leadership Council. These young people tackle community issues including, health, hunger, children and environment.

We deliver results and make change happen. In 2007 we managed 98 projects with 1,776 volunteers and 7,397 hours of service to our community. Just four years later, in 2011, we managed 1,396 projects with 9,482 people to make our community a better place. Best of all, while research shows that one in three volunteers say they will not volunteer again because their time was so badly utilized; our volunteer satisfaction rate is 97%!

Our vision is that one day every person will discover their power to make a difference, creating healthy communities in vibrant democracies around the world. We hope you'll cast your vote to help us develop more and better volunteers and volunteer leaders and deliver more and better volunteer projects.

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Our Contact Info:

HandsOn Jacksonville
6817-1902 Southpoint Parkway
Jacksonville, FL 32216

(904) 332-6767
hojteam@handsonjacksonville.org

www.handsonjacksonville.org