Spark Fund provided $250 of match funding
35 for 35: A Future Built by Doing
United States
Your donation unlocks match funding
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Your donation unlocks match funding
Part of the New York Founding 50
Aim
🎯Turn dollars into impact: Help raise $35,000 toward equipping 35,000 young people with leadership skills through community service.
Help young people build the experience their future demands.
Your gift supports young people develop leadership skills by improving their communities—and demonstrates what they can do in school, at work, and throughout their lives.
How do you gain experience before someone gives you a chance?
Learning to lead a team, solve a problem, or see a project through takes practice. As technology changes work, preparing the next generation means creating opportunities to develop judgment, communication, collaboration, and initiative.
DoSomething gives young people a place to start: taking action on issues they care about.
When Isoke, a young Brooklyn leader and founder of The Village House Pantry, realized her digital outreach wasn’t reaching neighbors who were offline or didn’t speak English, she adapted. With DoSomething’s coaching, she shifted to multilingual flyers and face-to-face engagement—putting communication, problem-solving, and adaptability into practice to make food-access information more accessible.
Your gift helps more young people build these skills through community action—and carry that experience into what comes next.
From the first volunteer action to leading others.
Over the last 33 years, DoSomething has mobilized more than 8.5 million young people. Now we’re building Pathway to 35, a guided journey across our programs and digital platform that helps young people take on community projects while developing and documenting their skills.
Your contribution helps today’s youth:
- Build skills with purpose: connect community actions to specific skills young people can practice and strengthen.
- Grow into greater responsibility: provide guidance and next steps from participating in a project to leading one.
- Carry accomplishments forward: create a service resume that demonstrates skills and leadership developed that they can draw on for college, scholarship, and job applications.
By 2028, our goal is to equip 35,000 young people to be leaders and contribute more than 1.2 million community service hours.
Help build their next opportunity.
We need your help to raise $35,000 by December 31 to support the next phase: updating our program experiences, strengthening how young people develop skills, and building tools to track each young person’s growth as we work toward integrating skill validation across our core programs in 2027.
$35 · Spark a first step
Help provide accessible community actions where young people practice teamwork, communication, and problem-solving.
$350 · Support growth into leadership
Support DoSomething’s project guides and planning tools that help young people turn an idea into a community project—building skills and practicing teamwork, communication, and problem-solving along the way.
$3,500 · Make experience resume-ready
Help build tools that translate young people’s community projects into resume-ready descriptions of their skills and accomplishments for college, scholarship, and job applications.
Give $35, $350, $3,500—or an amount meaningful to you.
Their communities benefit today. Your investment helps them carry that experience into everything they do next.
Funding method
Keep what you raise – this project will receive all pledges made by 31st December 2026 at 11:55am CST