It would be an understatement to say it’s been a busy few months since Matt, Mark and I built and launched Crisis Heroes.

What began as a simple conversation about how we could help the vulnerable during the covid-19 crisis lockdown, became a journey that has seen us win a Devpost global hackathon, receive the People’s Choice award from a Startup Victoria pitch night and pave the way to support volunteer organisations and not-for-profits.

The next step in the Crisis heroes journey is as important as the first, and not something we’ve come about accidentally. Since launching Crisis Heroes in March, we’ve been contacted by various NFPs, charities and volunteer groups around Australia and through our conversations, we’ve identified quite a few pain points with the way these organisations recruit, vet and manage volunteers.

Before taking on volunteers, many organisations require specific checks to be made, e.g (Identification checks, Police checks, Working with children and vulnerable people). The problem is that conducting and managing these checks can be time consuming and difficult to arrange. A police check for example, can take up to 20 days to receive an answer. We feel that Crisis Heroes is perfectly positioned to help solve this problem.

For the last few weeks, we have been talking with experts and gathering feedback from organisations around Australia, which are assisting us to build our Volunteer groups function. This essentially allows any NFP, charity, volunteer organisation or local community group to join Crisis Heroes in order to recruit new members/volunteers and increase the groups visibility among the Crisis Heroes community.

Volunteer groups will be able to recruit new members with confidence as we are working to conduct and support all of the checks listed above (and more) through an API that should return confirmation in most cases within 24 hours.

If you are a organisation interested in our groups function, please register your expression of interest here.