Power of the Hour Reaches 2 000 000 Hours!!

On the morning of March 25th, the Power of the Hour campaign hit 2,202,342 hours! Our goal was to encourage volunteering, by challenging Canadian businesses, individuals and organizations to pledge their volunteer hours for 2010 - and we hit our 2 million hour goal three months into our campaign! That's means that Canadians are doing amazing work engaging their communities and participating in volunteering all over the country! How many volunteer hours do we as Canadians really do a year?!

Volunteer Canada has pulled together facts and statistics on Canadian volunteering - and we see some fabulous numbers. Virtually all Canadians (95%) engage in at least one form of social support. 71% of businesses either support or accommodate employee volunteering. 12% of the population are "top-volunteers" - they contribute 78% of all Canadian volunteer hours! And with Power of the Hour we can see and track this explosion of social commitment and change!

Thanks to our devoted, engaged and involved members of Power of the Hour and Get Involved we know that over 2,000,000 hours are going to be spent creating social good in the year 2010. But what does the number 2,000,000 really mean - it's such a huge number that it can be hard to grasp how much these hours will make a difference.

For starters, there is only 8,760 hours in a year. For one individual to complete 2 million hours of volunteer service by themselves it would take 228 years. But look at what we can do collectively, we are making this contribution in a single year!

2 000 000 hours is enough time to build 1,300 Habitat for Humanity Homes.

It takes 28 hours to fly from New York to Australia - you could fly back and forth 71,428 times!

BUT 2 million dollars would only buy you half a Lear Jet Airplane.

Thanks to all of our amazing organizations, businesses and individuals who are working so hard, and helping their communities, our country and the world! Collectively we are a force that IS making a difference.