Who would have thought that finding a place to volunteer for a group of 25 would be so difficult? I’m organizing my company’s summer volunteer event for the NYC office in August this year, and I reached out to six different organizations to ask if they could accommodate us. This was everything from New York Cares, which organizes hundreds if not thousands of events all year long across organizations, soup kitchens, homeless shelters, to under-resourced schools. All but one said they couldn’t accommodate us either because our group size was too large, or they had already booked up for that specific week in August.

Getting a job in New York City is competitive. Finding the perfect apartment here is competitive. And even finding an ideal volunteer opportunity for a willing and able group of 25 in this city is extremely competitive.