Site Allows Members to Share Talents to Build the Church
On vineyard.ChurchofJesusChrist.org, members can use their talents to help complete projects for the Church that might take years to finish otherwise.
Article Highlights
- The Vineyard website allows members to use their talents to contribute to Church operations in their spare time.
- During the beta period, more than 3,200 volunteers completed more than 8,000 tasks from translation to photography to data entry.
"There is . . . work that, if done by a traditional workforce, could take up to 30 years to do." —Joseph Jatip, community development manager of the Church Human Resources Department
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As Church membership grows, so do opportunities to serve in the Lord’s vineyard. And while countless opportunities exist within wards, stakes, and local communities, a new corner of the vineyard is opening online.
Helping in the Vineyard—named for the analogy of the Lord’s kingdom used frequently in the scriptures and available at vineyard.ChurchofJesusChrist.org—is a new Church website created to house the growing number of volunteer projects members of the Church can assist with. Projects include translation, FamilySearch indexing, photography, tagging videos and images, and editorial work and are available from any location with Internet access.
For example, a member might sign up to help translate a document for seminary and institute from one language to another. After moderators have reviewed the translations, it will be released to seminaries and institutes in the second language.
“The Church has a lot of data,” said Joseph Jatip, community development manager of the Church Human Resources Department. “There is . . . work that, if done by a traditional workforce, could take up to 30 years to do—maybe even more.”
As the Church continues to grow, Church organizations will increasingly rely on the volunteer work of service missionaries and members, Brother Jatip said, and everyone’s help is needed. “If you have only five minutes to serve, there is an opportunity for you do that on the Vineyard,” he said.
To begin, members create a profile on the website and outline the kinds of skills they have, such those associated with language or technology. Based on this information, the site will then recommend available opportunities that may be of interest to the volunteer. All projects on the Vineyard help prepare content and tools for worldwide distribution and use among general Church membership.
“The goal of the Vineyard is to be another way for people to help the Church and to actually help directly with Church operations,” Brother Jatip said. “They can say, ‘I helped work on that [content] so other members can use it and find it on the Web for talks and lessons.’ ”
Vineyard creators hope to have 10,000 volunteers register and participate in online projects during 2011. Some 3,200 volunteers helped complete 8,000 tasks during the site’s beta period from January 28 to February 7.
Members can sign up to participate at vineyard.ChurchofJesusChrist.org.
