About Arkansas Serve
Arkansas Serve is a website for finding volunteer work anywhere in Arkansas, signing up for it, and keeping a record of the hours you serve. This page is about the site itself — who runs it, how it makes money, and what it is careful not to claim.
What this is
Three groups of people need the same thing from different directions, and none of them has an easy way to reach the others.
People who want to serve
Students, families and adults looking for something real to do near where they live — and, often, a record of having done it.
Organizations that need help
Nonprofits, churches, libraries, parks and civic groups with work to be done and no budget for software to organise it.
Schools and courts
Institutions that have to see documented, auditable hours rather than a handwritten note.
Arkansas Serve sits in the middle of the three: a place to publish opportunities, a place to find them, and a record that survives the walk from the event to the front office.
Why it exists
Two things create steady demand for documented service hours in this state. Arkansas high school students have a community-service requirement to graduate, created by statute. And young people involved with the juvenile courts are often ordered to complete service hours and have to prove they did.
Both groups face the same practical problem, and so does everyone helping them: finding the opportunity is one job, and proving the hours afterwards is a second, harder one that usually comes down to a piece of paper somebody has to not lose.
Meeting a graduation or court requirement is not something this site can do for you. What it can do is give you somewhere to look, and give the organization you served with a straightforward way to confirm that you were there.
What it costs
Nothing, for everyone the public sees. Volunteers, students, families and the organizations posting opportunities do not pay to use this site, and there is no paid tier that unlocks the listings.
Arkansas Serve is a for-profit Arkansas software business. It earns money by selling district-level tools to school systems that need to administer the requirement across thousands of students, and through regional sponsorships. That is the whole model: the institutions with budgets and a compliance obligation pay for the software, and the directory stays free.
We say this plainly because it changes how you should read the rest of the site. We are a vendor, not a charity, and we do not solicit donations. If you want to back the platform commercially, that is set out on the support page.
What we do not do
The useful part of an about page is usually the limits, so here they are without softening.
Plainly stated
- We are not official. Arkansas Serve is not a government site, is not endorsed by any state agency or department, and is not affiliated with any school district unless that district has separately bought something from us. No school requires you to use this site.
- We cannot promise your hours will be accepted. We produce a documented, exportable record. Whether a particular school or a particular court honours it is entirely their decision, and you should ask them what they need before you rely on anything.
- Coverage is uneven. Some counties have a lot posted and some have almost nothing. An empty county page is a true result, not a broken one.
- Most listed organizations have not joined. Thousands of Arkansas organizations appear in the directory because they are in public IRS filings or published school district lists — not because they agreed to be listed, and most do not know they are. You contact those directly; nothing you do here reaches them. How the two kinds of listing differ.
- We do not run third-party analytics or advertising trackers. That is a commitment written into the privacy policy, not a preference, and it is why some things on this site are measured coarsely or not at all.
- We do not advertise to minors, and we do not publish photographs identifying a young person without a signed release.
Using and sharing what is here
Everything public on this site is meant to be passed around, and none of it needs an account to read.
- Every page has a stable address. Each event, organization and county page has its own web address you can copy out of the address bar and send to somebody — in a newsletter, a group chat, a bulletin or a flyer. Nobody needs to sign in to open it.
- Printing works. Event and report pages are styled for paper, so a listing or an hours report can go up on a noticeboard or into a folder.
- Link freely. You never need permission to link to a page here, and we would rather you did than copied the text, because a link stays correct when a date changes and a copy does not.
- Republishing listings in bulk — ask first. A lot of what is in the directory came out of other people's public records, and the events belong to the organizations that posted them. If you want to mirror, syndicate or feed listings into another system, get in touch and we will tell you what is and is not ours to give.
- Pointing your community here. If you are a school, a chamber, a church or a civic group and you want to tell people about the site, email us and say who your audience is — that is a conversation we are glad to have.
Who runs it
Arkansas Serve is operated by Arkansas Serve LLC, a single-member Arkansas limited liability company. It is a small operation, which is worth knowing when you write to us: the reply comes from a person.
Where to go next
How to use the site How the site is organised For organizations
What we collect and what you can ask us to do about it are set out in full in the Privacy Policy and the Terms & Conditions. This page deliberately does not summarise them, because a summary that drifts from the commitment is worse than no summary.