This month, we bring you some great examples of how non-profits are using wikis. Read on to see how wikis help these organizations reach out to their communities, manage volunteers, create resources, and more.
CARE is a global non-profit working to fight poverty. They use Wikispaces Private Label as a platform for members to communicate, collaborate, and share best practices. They have many wikis on their site, including:
- A knowledge café where individuals share best practices for engaging the cultures and communities in which they work
- A wiki where they train their global members and volunteers in emergency preparedness and response
- Various wikis designed by groups of employees interested in bringing new capacities to the organization
- Wikis devoted to strategic planning, improving their organization, and measuring the impact of their various projects and initiatives
With Wikispaces Private Label, CARE has built an active community where members can find resources, develop skills, and improve the long-term health of the organization.

Based in Washington State, Communities Connect Network (CCN) is focused on developing technical resources and skills in low-income and under-served regions of the state. CCN supports and trains hundreds of community organizations to achieve their program goals with the use of technology. Participants use the wiki to tell their stories, share documents and training resources, collaborate, and network with others doing similar work.
The Earth Charter Initiative (ECI) works to build a just, sustainable, and peaceful global society. Their Earth Charter Youth Groups are designed to bring together youths and adults from diverse backgrounds to tackle issues in their communities. Currently, there are about 60 official groups in over 30 countries. They use their wiki to promote each group, share minutes and activity reports, and upload resources and documents.
Wikispaces is an effective way for the ECI to help new groups get started, support existing groups in their day-to-day operations, and guide them as they implement projects in their communities. Jaana Laitinen, the International Youth Facilitator at the Earth Charter Initiative, loves how easy Wikispaces has made coordinating their global communities: “Wikispaces is perfect!…We use the wiki as a place to manage the creation of new groups. It serves as an application form for interested groups to sign-up, a space for us to review their applications, and finally as profile pages for each new group. For us the wiki is a great tool that we highly recommend to others.”
The Rt. 1 Day Center, a homeless center in Columbia, Maryland, uses their wiki to coordinate volunteers for their meals, showers, laundry and social services. More than 40 churches in the area partner with the center, volunteering for a day’s service once a month. The wiki is the community hub where volunteers sign-up, check what’s been happening at the center, and inform next-day volunteers about needed food and supplies.
Until recently, the woodworking industry was one of the few industries left without standards to help evaluate, educate and compensate their workforce. A group of woodworking professionals from across the industry used Wikispaces to compile a set of skills standards. Wikispaces enabled them to rewrite the standards for 33 woodworking tools with only a single face-to-face meeting. The work they did on the wiki over a two year period was approved by the Woodwork Career Alliance of North America [WCANA] and released in July 2009 as a 134 page manual for the field.