Sola Caritas is a website that helps charities raise donations and find volunteers for their causes.

To date, it holds the largest database of volunteering opportunities in Canada.  It has 178 partner charities and counting.  Sola Caritas has been awarded the RBC Innovation Award Gold Medal, the EcoVenture First Place Award, and third place in the Lee Kuan Yew Global Business Plan Competition.  It is currently a Canadian-registered for-profit corporation.

History:

Sola Caritas was started when my two friends and I became frustrated with how difficult it was to find volunteering opportunities and to give back to the community – especially financially.  This was back in 2007.

So we came up with the idea of tying together corporate advertisement fees with charitable donations, facilitated by viewers.  Hence Sola Caritas, which means “By Charity Alone” in Latin, was born.

Currently:

Since then, our model has evolved into creating an online philanthropic profile for our users.  Much like how Facebook is your social profile, LinkedIn is your professional profile, Sola Caritas will be your philanthropic profile, detailing all the good deeds you have done for your community and beyond.  Check out my philanthropic profile at www.solacaritas.com/davidwen!

Your philanthropic profile has two parts – one part is how much money you have raised for your community through watching video ads placed by our partner companies.  The other part is a resumé of your volunteering history, which can be inputted by users themselves, then verified by our partner charities.

Video advertising that can be targeted at specific demographics, which drives up the value for our company partners.  These demographics are voluntarily inputted by our users, because they know that the more non-personal demographic information they tell us (age, how often they’re online, do they own an iPod, etc.), the more money the company will donate to a charity of their choice each time that company’s video is watched.  Users can also track their donations and further more, find meaningful volunteering opportunities that they might like, and sign up for them on the spot.

Going Forward:

Sola Caritas is in the process of rebuilding its current system.  Over the past year, we had some pitfalls with our outsourced developers and the majority of our work could not be completed.  This year we have brought the work in-house and are now excitedly rebuilding our great initiative.  We hope you can be a part of it!