Web site helps volunteers 'pay it forward' online

December 27, 2009

SANDRA GUY Sun-Times Columnist
Volunteer Gear, a local e-tailer, does more than sell T-shirts. It runs an interactive Web site that lets volunteers pass along their good deeds and ask others to do likewise.

"I am a strong believer in paying it forward," says Jennifer Lee, an Arlington Heights native who works as director of operations for the Palatine-based company. "If everyone could lend a helping hand, that's what life is about."

Here's how it works: When a customer buys a $19.95 T-shirt online at Volunteer Gear.com or in a handful of local boutiques where the T-shirts are sold, the T-shirt comes with a set of dog tags with a single serial number engraved on both tags. The line of 23 T-shirts says "volunteer" on the back and has motivational sayings on the front, such as "Don't Be a Life Potato" and "I Am the Best Alternative Energy Source."

The buyer registers his dog-tag number on the VolunteerGear.com site, along with his or her volunteer deed. The volunteer answers questions about what he or she did and who he helped. Every serial number registered on the site is placed on Google Maps so that volunteers can watch a chain of good deeds spread geographically. The volunteer is encouraged to give the second dog tag to a friend or relative and ask that person to carry on the good deed-doing. Each time the chain is updated, the original tag holders receive e-mail updates. Volunteers may write comments on each volunteer post, much like Facebook or MySpace. The next step in interactivity will be enabling people to personalize their T-shirts and allowing young designers to create cause-based T-shirt designs.

"We think this is a great mechanism for high school students who can show colleges the kinds of volunteer work and community work they've done, or for churches who want to get young people involved," said Lee, who lives in Algonquin. "One of our first sales was to a church group in Michigan for the children's ministry unit."

"My family is doing Salvation Army bell-ringing a couple times as part of our volunteering," Lee said. "My younger daughter, Stephanie, 13, can register her dog tag online, talk about her experience and pass the second tag on to one of her girlfriends asking if she can help someone too." Lee's other children are Tyler, 16, and Alex, 7.

"The goal is to stimulate acts of kindness and doing things for others," said Lee, who gained experience in wholesaling and online retailing when she ran her own company for six years that sold collegiate-licensed sandals, handbags and giftware.

Lee, who holds a degree in finance with a concentration in risk management from the University of Wisconsin at La Crosse, had previously had a career as an insurance underwriter and with a consulting firm that handled risk management for a major corporation. Though she rose to a vice president's rank in her 20s, she left the work force when her second child was 2½ years old to focus on being a mom. She needed a more stable income than her collegiate-gift company allowed, and she found the answer with the Pepper Group, a marketing agency based in Palatine, and its owner, Tim Padgett. Padgett is the primary shareholder of Volunteer Gear and asked Lee to become its operations director.

Volunteer Gear has attracted the attention of corporations and intends to work with their employee volunteers.

"We want to create a group chain that will be branded with the company's image, track how many people are involved in the volunteer efforts, how many hours they volunteered, and whether and how much money was raised," Lee said. "Each employee will start his own volunteer chain, and that will feed into the group chain."

Though the effort will undoubtedly help corporations brag about their social responsibility, the chain still relies on the social aspect of passing along a dog tag and getting more people involved.

"I've started promoting the idea to the National Football League and to the Major League Baseball organizations," Lee said.

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Autumn Anderson, a Humboldt Park resident, has found her way of giving back in MicroPlace.com, a subsidiary of eBay that lets people invest in the world's working poor. Anderson, who commutes daily to Portage, Ind., for her work as a quality-control lab supervisor at a pharmaceutical company, found out about MicroPlace at a "Green Festival" at Navy Pier.

"I liked the idea that for very small amounts of money, people can provide loans to others throughout the world," Anderson said. "Even though you don't know the recipient's name, it's a personal transaction, and I like the idea of my money doing something very directly for someone else."

The minimum investment to enable a microloan is $20.

MicroPlace lists loans by category, ranging from "green" investing to helping female small-business owners, to helping groups in varying levels of poverty. Users may search in more than one category, such as women business owners who operate in areas of great poverty. The Web site gives an example of a sample borrower in each category, as well as the likely rate of return and what percentage of a loan your donation enables. Investors receive interest payments and their money at maturity back into either their bank account or a PayPal account, and have the option to reinvest. MicroPlace is run by former eBay and PayPal executives, including General Manager Ashwini Narayanan and Founder Tracey Pettengill Turner, who previously started and ran 4charity, a Web-based marketplace for charitable giving.

"It's not necessarily guaranteed money," said Anderson, 33. "It's possible that unforeseen circumstances would prevent someone from guaranteeing the loan. You have to balance the impact.''