How to use Arkansas Serve

Two different things share the events list, and what you do next depends on which one you are looking at. Every card says which it is.

• Opportunity — posted by an organization that uses this site. You sign up here, check in on the day, and your hours are recorded.
• Community event — gathered from a public calendar. There is nothing to sign up for here; you contact the organizer the way they publish. Your hours are not tracked through us unless that organization joins.

The same split runs through the organization directory: how the two kinds of organization differ.

That is a real result rather than a broken filter. Coverage across the state is genuinely uneven, and some counties have very little posted.

Three things worth trying, in order:

1. Clear the place filters and widen to the whole county — a ZIP filter is the usual culprit.
2. Turn off "only show events with space". Full events are often recurring ones whose next date is wide open.
3. Scroll to the organizations the page suggests instead. Most Arkansas organizations in our directory have not joined the site, but they are real and many take volunteers.

For that last route, a short email offering something specific gets answered far more often than a general one. "I'm free Saturday mornings in October and I can lift and carry — do you need anyone?" beats "do you need volunteers?" by a wide margin.

Shifts. Some events run in slots and you pick one. You are committing to that slot only, not to the whole day.

Repeating events. An event that happens every week shows as one card with its next date. Open it to pick the date you want — taking one Saturday does not sign you up for the rest.

Cancelling. You can cancel from your dashboard and the spot goes back into the pool. Do it as soon as you know, even if it feels late: an organizer who finds out the night before can move somebody up, and one who finds out on the morning cannot.

If you are under 18, a guardian has to approve before you can sign up, and some events ask for a fresh approval of their own — usually travel, water, an overnight or a late finish. See guardians and consent.

You can use this site the same way anyone else does, and nothing on your public profile says why you are volunteering.

One thing to sort out before you start rather than after: ask whoever ordered the hours what they will accept. Some want a specific form, some want particular kinds of work, and some want the organization to be a registered nonprofit. This site can give you a documented, exportable record of what you did and when — but whether that record satisfies a particular court is that court's decision, not ours, and it is much easier to ask first than to redo fifty hours.

Checking in. Scan the QR code or type the short code the organizer displays. Do it when you arrive — codes expire, and the one on the sign at 8am may not work at 2pm. If there is no code, the organizer checks you off their roster instead; make sure they have seen you.

If hours did not appear, ask the organization that ran the event. They hold the roster and they are the only ones who can correct it. Say which event, which date, and what you think the hours should be — a query that names the day gets fixed, and one that says "my hours are wrong" starts a conversation instead.

Getting them approved. If you are meeting a school or court requirement, an administrator at that school or JDC approves the hours after the organization has confirmed them. That is a separate step and it is theirs, not the organization's.

Taking your record with you. You can download everything we hold about you from your dashboard, and administrators can export and print an hours report.

Name the task, not the occasion. The name is often the only thing somebody reads. "Saturday Food Bank Sorting" tells a stranger whether they can do it and whether they would like it; "Volunteer Day" tells them nothing.

The description answers three questions, and if it does not, you will answer them one email at a time in the week before:

• What will I actually be doing, hour by hour?
• What should I wear and bring, and am I inside or outside?
• Who do I look for when I arrive?

Say plainly if the work is physical, if there is lifting, if there is a lot of standing, or if there is a quieter job for somebody who needs one. People choose accurately when you tell them, and drop out on the morning when you do not.

Post the volunteer window, not your setup window. Somebody who reads 7am, arrives, and finds nothing to do until 9 will not come twice.

Hours credit is how many service hours one volunteer earns for doing the event once. Set it to the time people are actually working — not the span the event occupies. Lunch and travel are not service hours, and if you run shifts the figure should describe one shift rather than the whole day.

This number is what a school or court sees. It is a figure you are vouching for, so rounding it up is the fastest way to have your records questioned.

Max sign-ups caps registration; zero means no cap. Set it to the number you can genuinely supervise and give real work to. Count the jobs first: six sorting stations and one truck is a cap of about eight, however many people would happily sign up. Volunteers who stand around for an hour do not come back, and they tell people.

Public or members-only. Public listings appear on the public events page and the county page for their ZIP; members-only ones are visible to people already in your organization. Public does not mean unmanaged — people still sign in to sign up, so you still get a roster and the consent steps still run. Default to public unless you specifically need people you have already trained.

Shifts split one event into slots with their own caps. Worth it for anything over about three hours, or when you need steady coverage rather than a crowd at the start. Overlap them by fifteen minutes so the outgoing group briefs the incoming one and you stop repeating yourself.

Repeating events create the whole run of dates at once. Each date is separate with its own roster, so somebody can take one Saturday without committing to all of them, and they draw as a single card so a weekly event does not bury everything else in the county. Preview the dates before saving — a "monthly" rule and a "first Tuesday" rule produce different calendars.

Questions at sign-up get answered at registration and land on your roster, instead of being chased by email. Ask only what changes what you do: sizes, lifting, vehicles, allergies. Every extra question costs you some sign-ups, and one whose answer you will not act on costs them for nothing. Do not collect anything you would rather not be storing — medical detail is easier to take on the day.

Self check-in codes. You can generate a short code and QR code that volunteers scan to check themselves in. Worth it above about fifteen people; below that, checking them off yourself is faster than explaining it. Print it large and put it where people walk in. Codes expire, and you can rotate one — which invalidates the old one — if it has been shared where it should not have been.

Give the roster to one person for the whole event and say who in the briefing. Two people checking in from two phones is how somebody ends up marked absent while standing in front of you.

Walk-ins. Somebody who turns up without registering can be added on the spot, past the cap and past any requirements — the control assumes you have looked at the person in front of you and decided. Get an email address at the door: without one they cannot be matched to an account later and their hours have nowhere to land.

Volunteers from another organization. Your roster shows when somebody belongs to a different organization; which one is not disclosed to you. Because they have no record inside your organization, requirements you set on the event cannot be checked against them. Treat them as you would anyone who walked in off the street — brief them properly and check anything that genuinely matters in person.

Logging. Most hours come straight from an event's roster. For service that did not come from an event here — a weekday helper, a standing volunteer, work agreed directly — you can log it for one person and attach a supporting document. Put something real in the note: "helped out" is not a record anybody can stand behind six months later.

Approving. Schools and JDCs have an approvals queue where logged service is approved, rejected or voided. Approving is the step that makes hours count toward a requirement. Reject hours that were not served as described; void a record that should not exist at all. You can set a policy that auto-approves hours meeting conditions you choose, which is worth doing once the queue stops being realistic by hand.

Work the queue on a fixed day each week. This is the one backlog whose delay lands on somebody else — a student waiting on hours for a graduation requirement can do nothing but wait.

The report built from those decisions uses legal names, because it is the artifact a school or court reads. It can be exported and printed.

"Hours credited here" is not a service record. That column counts the hours your organization credited somebody. A volunteer can have served all year across four organizations and show a small number on your screen. It is the right figure for your reporting and the wrong one for judging a person.

Roles run from member upward: event admins can create and run events, group admins additionally manage volunteers, and organization admins manage the organization itself. Give the lowest level that does the job — you can raise it in a second and it is the setting people forget to lower.

Somebody can hold a different role in each organization they belong to. Roles are always resolved per organization, so being an admin of one gives you nothing in another.

Overseers record who in your organization is responsible for a volunteer — who answers questions about them and signs their hours off. A volunteer with no overseer is the one who goes quiet and is never followed up.

Credentials are things you track about a person: a signed waiver, a completed training, a background check, a certification. You choose what each is called and how hard it bites — advisory, blocks registration, or blocks check-in. Use "blocks registration" for anything genuinely mandatory; "blocks check-in" turns a paperwork problem into a person being turned away after they have driven across town.

Importing. You can bulk-add volunteers and past service from a spreadsheet, within per-file caps. Run ten rows first and read the result before you import nine hundred — column headings that are nearly right are the usual cause of an import that "worked" and produced nothing useful.

Two ways in. Either follow the link sent to your email address and approve there, or — if you have your own account on the site — approve from the guardian card on your dashboard. Both do the same thing.

Standing consent, plus exceptions. Your approval covers the young person volunteering with that organization generally. Individual events can additionally ask you to approve them specifically, which organizers are asked to use for things you would want to be told about separately: an overnight, travel out of town, water, heights or a late finish.

Withdrawing. You can withdraw consent at any time. Doing so cancels their upcoming registrations with that organization, frees the spots, and notifies the organizers. It takes effect immediately and does not need anyone's agreement.

What to ask an organization before you approve. Who is supervising, how many adults are there, whether volunteers are ever alone with an adult, what the work physically involves, and how a young person gets home if plans change. Those answers belong to the organization running the event, not to this site — and an organization that answers them clearly is telling you something useful.

What we collect about a young person, and what you can ask us to do about it, is set out in the Privacy Policy.