英语翻译志愿者活动（一）－－本周日结帖

VolunteerMatch at a Glance

Suppose you’ve recently moved to a new city and are looking for a place to volunteer, or you’re developing an interest in an important social issue, or you want to spend a weekend doing something to make the world a better place: how can you turn your good intentions into action? VolunteerMatch has provided an effective answer to this question for hundreds of thousands of people across the U.S. since its founding in 1998.

Launched at the height of the Internet start-up boom, VolunteerMatch is the largest web-based volunteer-matching service in the country. Its founder, Jay Backstrand, began his career at Sun Microsystems where he was one of the principal organizers of NetDay, a service day that mobilized more than 25,000 volunteers to connect California schools to the Internet. Inspired by the Internet’s potential, Backstrand decided to create and run a website that would allow nonprofit organizations to post their volunteer opportunities for free. The idea took off, and before long he had left Sun to run the nonprofit site full time.

VolunteerMatch pursued its mission, “to help everyone find a great place to volunteer,” by creating an easy-to-use online database of volunteer opportunities with community service organizations throughout the country. Volunteers could search the database of listings by location, date, or type of nonprofit. They could also look for opportunities to suit their own needs; for example, rganizations that welcomed large groups or volunteers who wished to bring their children with them. Once a potential volunteer found an interesting opportunity in the database, she or he would send an e-mail referral to the nonprofit organization. From that point, the nonprofit organization and volunteer communicated independently to arrange a meeting. By September 2001 when VolunteerMatch and Bridgespan began working together, the site had registered over 17,000 nonprofit organizations and tracked over 500,000 referrals between volunteers and organizations.

Backstrand secured the organization’s initial $200,000 in funding by approaching individuals in his personal and professional network. As the organization expanded to over a dozen employees and moved its offices to central San Francisco, its fundraising strategy expanded as well. The development team initially focused on contributions from individuals, but then shifted towards grants from small foundations and then to multi-year grants from national foundations. At the same time, the organization’s senior managers were eager to find ways to support VolunteerMatch’s activities without relying exclusiv ely on philanthropy. To this end, they developed VolunteerMatch Corporate, a fee-based customized version of the VolunteerMatch site that companies could host on their intranets to encourage employees to volunteer in their communities. They also entered into a few licensing deals, which allowed other Internet-based organizations to display a version of the VolunteerMatch database on their websites. By the end of 2000, although both of these business units were generating revenue, genuine earned income—meaning a positive contribution to VolunteerMatch overall—was still an ambitious goal.

Key questions

As the VolunteerMatch team moved forward with Bridgespan to explore its earnedincome potential, several key questions emerged to guide the process:

What changes would be required for the organization’s current business units to start making a positive financial contribution?
What other opportunities to expand VolunteerMatch’s earned-income efforts existed, and how should they be prioritized?
What would it take to implement the new ventures, and how could VolunteerMatch guard against undertaking initiatives that would subtract more from the organization—in dollars and staff time—than they could possibly add?

楼上的大哥，您没看懂我的意思吧？这个帖子是悬赏翻译我贴出来的那些英文，可不是叫您贴歌词呀

在“捐献时间 分享快乐”网站上/ http://www.donatehour.org/ 看到这么一组数据：
已参与 607 志愿者
共捐献 3527 个小时
共使得 26962 人受益

希望更多的朋友参与。

呵呵，我先试一下：
志愿者活动一瞥：
假如你最近搬到了一座新城市，正在寻找一个志愿者活动的地方，或者你正对一个重要的社会问题很感兴趣，或者你想利用自己的周末时间去做一些事情，能让这个世界变得更好：那么，你如何能让你的善良的想法变成行动呢？在美国，从1998年至今已有几十万人次以其开展的志愿者活动对这些问题给出了有力的回答。

随着互联网如雨后春笋般的发展，“志愿者联合”成为了国家中基于网络的最大的志愿者联合服务活动。她的创始人Jay Backstrand，开始就职于sun 微系统公司，在那里他作为“网络日”的主要负责人，动员了从加利福尼亚学校到英特网总数超过25000位志愿者参与服务，受互联网潜力的激励和影响，Backstrand决定创建并运行一个能够提供非盈利组织招募他们所需要的志愿者的免费网站。这个主意提出不久，他就离开了sun公司，全身心的投入到非盈利网站的建设和运行上来。

－－好几个地方翻译的怪怪的，有点牵强，，有问题请指正，谢谢！