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| Catchafire | |
|---|---|
| Name | Catchafire |
| Founded | 2009 |
| Founders | Rachael Chong |
| Headquarters | New York City |
| Focus | Skills-based volunteering, pro bono services, nonprofit capacity building |
Catchafire is a skills-based volunteering and talent-matching organization that connects professionals with nonprofit organizations. It operates a platform to match specialists with projects in areas such as strategic planning, marketing, finance, and technology, serving a broad array of charitable institutions. The organization has partnered with major nonprofits, corporations, and foundations to scale pro bono services and capacity-building interventions.
Catchafire was founded in 2009 by Rachael Chong in New York City following experience with Ashoka, AmeriCorps, and Teach For America-adjacent networks. Early collaborations included nonprofits and social enterprises linked to United Nations initiatives and municipal programs in New York City and San Francisco. The organization scaled through alliances with philanthropic intermediaries such as the Ford Foundation, Rockefeller Foundation, and Gates Foundation, while engaging corporate partners like Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Microsoft. Over time Catchafire has intersected with networks including VolunteerMatch, Idealist, Taproot Foundation, and Points of Light.
The platform offers project-based matches for nonprofits, providing access to professionals from firms and institutions such as McKinsey & Company, Bain & Company, Accenture, Deloitte, PwC, KPMG, EY, Boston Consulting Group, IDEO, Frog Design, Grant Thornton, and Capgemini. Services span strategy, fundraising, program evaluation, communications, and information technology, drawing volunteers with experience at Harvard University, Stanford University, Columbia University, Yale University, Princeton University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, New York University, University of California, Berkeley, and University of Pennsylvania. The platform design echoes features used by marketplaces such as Upwork, LinkedIn, Glassdoor, Indeed, and GitHub to manage profiles, project scopes, workflows, and feedback loops. Nonprofits served include organizations similar to Save the Children, Doctors Without Borders, Feeding America, Habitat for Humanity, Amnesty International, World Wildlife Fund, American Red Cross, UNICEF USA, Planned Parenthood, and The Nature Conservancy.
Catchafire has reported outcomes aligning with capacity-building outcomes sought by funders such as the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. Partnerships have included corporate social responsibility programs at Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, Morgan Stanley, Visa, Mastercard, IBM, Oracle, and Salesforce. It has collaborated with accelerator and incubator ecosystems including Y Combinator, Techstars, Echoing Green, Skoll Foundation, and Soros Economic Development Fund. Institutional partners in impact measurement include Nonprofit Finance Fund, Charity Navigator, GuideStar, GiveWell, and Independent Sector.
Catchafire operates a freemium and subscription model that integrates paid services and enterprise partnerships, drawing funding from venture philanthropy and impact investors such as Omidyar Network, Acumen Fund, NewSchools Venture Fund, and Blue Ridge Capital. Seed and later-stage capital rounds involved investors familiar with social enterprises like Kiva, TOMS Shoes, and Warby Parker-adjacent backers. Revenue streams include membership fees from nonprofits, corporate program fees, and sponsored matchmaking supported by foundations such as The Rockefeller Foundation and Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. It has engaged with service procurement frameworks used by institutions like United Way and The Salvation Army.
The platform combines talent-matching algorithms with project management tooling inspired by systems at Atlassian, Trello, Asana, Basecamp, Slack, Zoom Video Communications, and Dropbox. Technical stack practices align with cloud providers and developer ecosystems from Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform, Microsoft Azure, and integrations with Salesforce, NetSuite, Stripe, and PayPal. Operational partnerships have included human resources and volunteer engagement models from SHRM-affiliated networks and skills certification standards from institutions like Coursera, edX, General Assembly, Codecademy, and Udacity.
Critiques of skills-based volunteering platforms often reference debates present in analyses by Stanford Social Innovation Review, Harvard Business Review, and The Chronicle of Philanthropy concerning sustainability, dependency, and opportunity cost for organizations such as local community-based organizations and international NGOs including Oxfam and CARE International. Discussions have compared catch-and-release volunteer models to sustained capacity-building advocated by McKinsey Global Institute and World Bank studies, and raised concerns similar to those documented in cases involving international development actors like USAID and United Nations Development Programme. Corporate partnerships have prompted scrutiny from media outlets such as The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, The Guardian, and Bloomberg about effectiveness metrics and equity in access.
Catchafire and its leadership have received recognition from entrepreneurial and social impact platforms including Fast Company, Forbes, Inc., Entrepreneur (magazine), Fortune, TIME', and lists such as Crain's New York Business's profiles. Honors and program citations have appeared in events and award programs organized by Skoll Awards, Echoing Green Fellowship, Ashoka Fellowship, Clinton Global Initiative, TED, SXSW, and Webby Awards. Academic and policy acknowledgments have featured in conferences hosted by Brookings Institution, Council on Foreign Relations, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and United Nations fora.
Category:Nonprofit organizations based in New York City