Volunteering as a Distributed Team

Positive social and environmental causes are key to what “giving back” looks like at Kroo. We believe that banks can be an agent for good and that we should be actively seeking to make our positive impacts go further. Pre pandemic it was decently easy to get Kroo team members together. Our team is mostly located in London and happy to meet up, whether it be for hanging out in the office for a round of games or giving back our time to different organisations.

But now with the third year of the pandemic upon us, we had to find a way to engage our team remotely. The Kroo people team set out to find a volunteering cause that was easy to set up remotely and which still benefited a great cause. With a bit of searching they found HOT Tasking Manager.

HOT Tasking Manager is a global community which maps the places most vulnerable to disaster and poverty. These maps are then used to support humanitarian aid and sustainable development across the world. Volunteers use satellite imagery from OpenStreetMap to trace buildings, roadways and other features. Then, experienced volunteers verify the map to ensure its quality. After validation the data is an asset to humanitarian organisations to leverage for disaster response. To date 122.6 million buildings and 2.7 million kilometres have been mapped with the help of 377k mappers*.

It’s simple to sign up and work collaboratively on projects with HOT Tasking Manager. Head to https://tasks.hotosm.org/explore to discover projects currently in need of contributors. Then select a project, send details to your team and work collectively from anywhere to centralise your efforts! In Kroo’s case, we selected to map areas impacted by cyclones ANA and BATSIRAI around Mahanoro.

The People team member who organised the event thought it was a great success. Nicholas says, “Overall, the event went great! The activity is quite casual and lends itself well to being done amongst conversation. With the addition of a Google Hangout, it makes for an awesome hybrid event, bringing together in-person and remote employees. It’s a wonderful, low-barrier way to help out and a great excuse to share a slice of pizza and a few beers with some co-workers after hours while making a difference.”

We plan to organise further opportunities for the Kroo team to contribute to HOT Tasking Manager.