City Pulse

Civic volunteering may not earn you a paycheck. But, the rewards are immense. The selfless act benefits one’s physical and mental health, boosts self-confidence, gives a sense of inner satisfaction and makes you an active citizen. 

Volunteering is also addictive. When one sees the positive impact they have brought about, it motivates them to do more. The best example of this are the students of Bengaluru Institute of Technology (BIT). 

Ajay K, one of the students from BIT and president of BIT Eco Club wanted to create awareness regarding the ills of single-use-plastic. Hence, in September 2019, he created an event using the volunteering feature on the I Change My City App. Through the platform he connected with like-minded volunteers and also invited his friends to join the cause. Around 127 volunteers signed up for the awareness campaign on the App. 

The success motivated him to host more awareness and clean-up drives. The positive change Ajay brought about, encouraged his peers. With every event Ajay hosted, the number of volunteers grew. 

On February 29, Ajay created an event ‘Swachh BIT’ and invited his college mates to clean the College campus. Close to 400 students signed up for the event on the I Change My City App and collectively spent over 1100 volunteering hours to give their college campus a facelift. Three hours on a Saturday morning is all it took for them to achieve their goal! 

Like Ajay you too can spark a social change. You can make a difference by spending a few hours in civic volunteering drives and initiating a positive change in your neighbourhood. You can find out more about the volunteering drives taking place in your neighbourhood by downloading the I Change My City App from Google Play store. iOS users can click here.

About I Change My City Volunteering Feature

I Change My City aims to transformatively scale active citizenship in the city of Bengaluru through civic volunteering.

The I Change My City app, which began its journey connecting citizens and governments on local civic grievances, expanded to include civic information and quality of infrastructure data.  The Citizen Volunteering feature now enables citizens to not just post complaints, but also create citizen volunteering events to proactively fix the issues. The feature is not restricted to only civic issues; it lends itself to creation of events and activities that focus on awareness and education, and assisting in social causes and initiatives.

Citizens can download the app; create an event on the app with key parameters which include the category of event, a description of the event, the location where it will be held, number of volunteers, date and time. Automatic notifications and messages are shared with other citizens who are on the app. Events across the city, events in the immediate neighbourhood are both accessible for citizens to volunteer. Citizens can choose to volunteer and data on the number of citizens participating in a particular event, the civic volunteering hours contributed towards the cause are displayed. 

I Change My City volunteering feature was developed under the concept ‘by the people for the people’. The civic hours contributed are collated and shared online and on the app real time to inspire others. Even as cities work on addressing the complex urban challenge, this feature will allow for citizens to continually stay engaged in local civic matters.