Mark Horoszowski is the co-founder of MovingWorlds, a global experteering platform. In this interview, Mark reveals how he got started with the platform and what it means to be a MovingWorlds experteer.
Describe MovingWorlds to someone who hasn’t used it before
The MovingWorlds matching site and support team helps people find the best place around the world to volunteer their skills. In exchange for donating your skills, you’ll be hosted by a social impact organization that will provide you unique local benefits, including free accommodations.
What was your inspiration for MovingWorlds?
Over 1.2 million people are volunteering overseas every year. Despite the fact that over 50% have completed a bachelor degree, the majority of these volunteers engage in manual work, often paying to volunteer (aka voluntourism).
Meanwhile, according to the World Economic Forum, “Access to talent” is one of the leading barriers to progress; meaning that the best way these educated professionals can give back is with their skills and time, not their money and labor.
Read more on Movingworlds blog
Who are the current MovingWorlds members?
Our collaborative consumption marketplaces has skilled volunteers that we call “Experteers” and social impact organizations we call “Hosts”
Experteers | Hosts |
All are looking to experience the world in a way that allows them to grow, while also making a sustainable impact. |
All can offer homestays, room & board, and/or small living stipends in exchange for the right expertise. |
What is your favourite MovingWorlds member story so far?
Most of our members have travelled overseas before, and are looking at skilled volunteering as a way to more deeply engage with communities. However, one of our most recent Experteers, Michael, had never been overseas before. An accountant for 30 years, he was looking for a way to pursue his true passion: photography and storytelling. He started searching on MovingWorlds and ended up getting matched with a nonprofit college in Ghana that needed help telling its story to initiate a fundraising campaign. While there, he took brilliant photos of the students, its health clinics, and beneficiaries. As he was shaping up the fundraising “story,” he was looking through the financials with the president of the college and ended up working to improve the forecasting and controls – not only helping better prepare the college for fundraising with pictures, but with a better financial story, too.
What are some of the challenges you have faced in bringing MovingWorlds to life? How are you overcoming them?
Like every organization, we have big visions of scaling. We made a lot of sacrifices early on to lay the foundation for scale, only to realize that’s not necessarily what customers wanted. We learned, the hard way, that when people come to us they don’t just want a simple matching website. They want support and community to take the trip of a lifetime. Providing those things at scale are much harder, and more expensive. However, we’re actively doing three things to support it:
- Talking to constituents, obsessively. For sharing economy platforms to work, you have to have an amazing understanding of the real needs and use-cases of both sides. We’ve setup and continue to run webinars, Google hangouts, and SoHelpful calls to make ourselves available.
- Automating the mundane, personalizing the personal. In people-centered businesses, you can’t automate empathy and customer focus. However, you can use technology to make it easier on support teams and users. We’re constantly pushing ourselves to provide a deeper personal experience, but still automating any task we can so we have the time to support our constituents (AKA Lean Startup Style).
- Building partnerships. The best part of working in collaborative consumption is that all stakeholders want to engage for common good. Once you are able to demonstrate value to the “ecosystem”, it makes it easy to call on partners for support in key areas (like outreach, content sharing, etc.). Our collaborative partnerships have helped us in ways that no marketing or development budget could ever make up for.
What do you envision for MovingWorlds in the future?
When people think about giving back, they think about donating. When they think about volunteering, they think about picking up trash or building homes. But that is not what the world needs – the world needs people to use their skills for good, and we want to empower an “Experteering movement”. Brain power and prior experiences are one of the most valuable assets that each of us have, and we want MovingWorlds to be a platform enabling people to engage in the experience of a lifetime:-one that develops new skills while enabling organizations to accelerate for impact. We’ve already heard stories of our Experteers putting this experience at the top of their resumes, and we’d like to see that as a right of passage for motivated people looking to get ahead and make an impact.
