Introducing Radical Engineers
Tech volunteers for non-profits
What we do
Radical Engineers matches system-changing non-profit organisations with the volunteer technologists they need.
Who do we try to help
We help organisations with systems-change goals. There are problems in the world and there are people who know how to solve those problems. These people are active, passionate, and usually well-versed in the problem they are tackling. They may be ex-NHS workers who have experienced the stress of being a junior doctor and are setting up support for people early in their medical career to prevent future burnout; or they may have worked with homeless people for years and know if they solve one small problem they can have a significant impact on long-term homelessness; or they may be any of a myriad of people who know how to solve a societal problem and have started working on it. The problem that Radical Engineers is solving is that the years of experience it takes to know how to solve a societal problem doesn’t mean you know how to create the tech you need to help you grow or improve… and most of these people inevitably need some form of tech support — which is expensive, time consuming and for which there is little support from charitable foundations.
Why our solution is helpful
Many aspects of the world of tech provide a plentiful resource of tech volunteers:
- People who code for a living are one of the few groups who will spend a whole day coding and then go home and think “finally, now I have time to code on my own projects”. For whatever reason, a lot of people who enjoy developer projects will do so in addition to their own work.
- Unlike many jobs, tech is one of the few areas where you are expected to work on tech projects outside of your career… whilst this is deeply unfair, it also provides an incredible resource of talented technologists open to working on interesting projects.
- Volunteering in the tech sector is an underwhelming experience for many tech volunteers. Two of the most common tech volunteering project types are a) open source projects, where coders will contribute towards a larger project usually designed for coders to use, and b) hackathons, in which you will spend a weekend building a prototype tool to test whether an idea might work to solve a problem. The problem with both of these types of volunteering are that you don’t really feel the impact of your contribution. In the former, you’re usually part of a large community helping to fill a niche technological gap, and in the latter, the prototypes are rarely used even to contribute towards a finished project.
As such, Radical Engineers’ volunteer opportunities is attractive to quite a few developers. We identifying tech projects with organisations actively helping to solve long term problems, and we match them with a developer with the appropriate skills. More importantly, we try to keep most of our projects to a managable length (10–20 hours) so a volunteer can often visualise how they can complete the project before they begin.
Where we are
Radical Engineers has existed since 2018, but it only launched formally as a charity in 2022. We have matched dozens of organisations with volunteers and we are looking to help more organisations as we grow and develop as a charity.
This article was written as part of Open Working Programme created by Third Sector Lab, hosted by
and , and funded by The Catalyst.
