Mandatory Service 101

If you’ve found yourself in need of completing mandatory service hours for graduation or work, by court order, or for any other reason, Hands On Atlanta is ready to help you out! Having posted more than four thousand opportunities that accept court-ordered volunteers this year, we have a simple four step process to help you meet your service requirements. Before we get into detail about those steps, here are some general tips to keep in mind along the way:

• Get started early! It’s easy to get stressed if you have 40 service hours to complete in a week, but remember that if you start earlier you will have a much easier time fitting your requirements into your schedule.

• You can sign up for as many service projects as you are able to attend provided that they aren’t full. We have projects available every week on a variety of days and times giving you lots of options!

• If you need to provide the name of a contact for your mandatory hours, we recommend that you choose one organization to serve all of your hours with. It will make it easy to provide the information for your main point of contact there instead of providing a point of contact for several different organizations.

With those tips in mind, let’s get into all the details of how to meet your mandatory service requirements.

1. Find a project: The easiest way to start finding service projects is to search our opportunity calendar. There you can search by date, impact area, location and more! Make sure to set the filters by date and geographic range that work for you, and keep the filter for court ordered volunteers to ensure that all the opportunities you see are right for you.

   Please note that if you try to sign up for a project that requires a background check, you may not be approved based on your offense. Please avoid selecting projects require background checks, as if you do not pass, you will not be eligible for any Hands On Atlanta projects at all.

2. Serve: You’re now ready to get out and serve the ATL community! There are a few things to keep in mind.

   • First, remember to double check that you’re arriving for your project at the right date and time that you registered for. Many opportunities have multiple time slots, and we want to make sure you’re here for the right one!

   • Also, remember to sign in for the project so there is a record of your attendance. Verifying your hours is the only way to get a service letter confirming your mandatory service, but we’ll talk more about this in step four.

   • The last thing to do when serving is to have fun! Take advantage of the opportunity to do something good, meet other people and gain a better understanding of challenges facing our community.

3. Download Your Own Letter: After completing all your hours, your letter will be available for download in your account - it’ll be listed as your Certificate. Simply log in to your account on the volunteer portal, then select My Opportunities. From there, select Certificate and History on the left side, and click Download Certificate. The file will save to your device as a PDF, and you can print or share it with anyone you need to. Find more detailed instructions here.

• On your Certificate, you will only see your verified hours of service. We understand that it can be frustrating to wait on these to come through, especially if you need them quickly. Please know that it typically takes between 5 and 7 business days for volunteer hours to be verified. If your hours are not verified within that time frame, please reach out to the organization directly. Hands On Atlanta cannot verify your hours for projects we don’t manage. If that doesn’t work either, then please reach out to Hands On Atlanta, and we will message the organization directly about getting hours verified.

• We know that sometimes a custom letter with a wet ink signature will be asked of you, but unfortunately we do not provide those. However, if you would like to have the person requesting a mailed letter to explain our current regulations, you have them contact us at info@handsonatlanta.org.

Ready to get started?