Knight Foundation

Informed & Engaged Communities

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The Extraordinaries (via Tides Fdn.)

Tides Center

Date Awarded: 08/01/09
Amount: $250,000
Grant Period: 08/01/09 to 05/31/11
Focus Area: Engaged Communities
Community: San Jose/Silicon Valley

Project Links

Sparked.com, the offspring of The Extraordinaries

Grantee Contact

Jacob Colker

San Francisco, CA
www.tides.org

Featured Media

To foster community engagement by allowing residents to use a mobile phone for volunteer activities in their community

For individuals, finding time to give back is a challenge. Many people don’t have several hours each week to volunteer. The Extraordinaries offers a new option, by letting people volunteer on demand, in bursts of idle time, using a smart phone application. A user could translate a document for a community group, for example, while waiting to catch a plane. The project, which will test launch in San Jose, Calif., seeks to transform the volunteer economy by making it possible for people to volunteer on demand, and for organizations to tap into the volunteer workforce.

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Project Team

Jacob Colker

A social entrepreneur and technologist, Jacob Colker has a strong background in political activism and issue advocacy. Jacob has managed political campaigns in California, Illinois and Maryland and was one of the first field directors in the country to infuse Facebook and other social networking tools into a major political campaign to win a statewide election (Peter Franchot, Comptroller of Maryland). Globally, Colker spent two years managing advocacy campaigns for The International Campaign for Tibet, coordinating with teams in Belgium, The Netherlands, Germany, Mexico, Australia, Nepal, and the United Kingdom. Colker has a bachelor’s in media management from Columbia College Chicago and is working part time on his master’s in communications from the Johns Hopkins University.