They may not be full-time social workers, but they are the volunteers with heart who spend their free time painstakingly updating data on websites that connect those who want to help and those who need help. Tiffany Tan reports.

When she has time, 15-year-old Michaela Zimmerman hangs out with friends, watches TV, runs at the gym, cooks or reads - like any other typical teenager. What's not so typical is that she also runs a website that puts volunteers in touch with local charities that need their help.

One of the notices on her site, volunteerbeijing.org, says that Crazy Bake, a group providing psychiatric patients with occupational therapy in the form of baking, needs "volunteers to distribute bread".

Another says that New Life Center, which offers educational programs for orphans, abandoned and migrant children, is looking for English teachers as well as people to "teach music, play sports and help with crafts".

Michaela, a native of San Diego, California, and currently a high school freshman at the Western Academy of Beijing, set up the website last summer as a service project for the Girl Scouts of the USA.

"I had to do something that would be sustainable and that could help out my local community," she says. "I was kind of lost for ideas, but I knew I wanted to do something to help out volunteers."

Her mother Ellen, who also serves as her Girl Scout troop leader, came up with the website idea after seeing someone ask on an expatriate forum online whether Beijing had a "website for volunteers".

Right now there are only eight organizations listed on Michaela's site, since most of her time, she says, is taken up by schoolwork. But she hopes to get that number up to 20 during the summer break.

Lasso-china.org, meanwhile, is aiming for 200 by next month.

The site, created in 2008 as a personal project of two friends, appears to be the biggest English-language online resource for volunteer work in China. Its German-American co-founder wanted to make the information easily available to foreigners like herself who are looking to help out the local community.

"Before I spoke Chinese it was always really hard. You had to ask people who had to ask people, 'Where can I volunteer?'" says Jennifer Thome, 29, who first came to China as a student researcher in 2002 and now works for a publication group in Beijing.

"There was never a platform where I could connect to charities."

Lasso China's database currently consists of around 160 organizations, grouped under 25 categories, including "children and orphans", "environmental protection", "medical charities", "poverty alleviation" and "LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender) Groups".

Volunteer positions are listed under several categories, including professional volunteers and young volunteers. They can also be searched according to geographical location: Beijing, Shanghai, Fujian, rural China and overseas.

Another goal of the website, says Ma Fangfang, 27, Thome's Chinese partner and a Beijing entrepreneur, is to publicize the work of little-known charities and show them there are people interested in lending a hand.

In its fourth year, Lasso China is not as well-known as its founders would like it to be, but its efforts have not gone unnoticed.

"As a non-profit supported purely by a group of individual rescuers and volunteers, we greatly appreciate the help from Internet media like Lasso China," says Sophia Lin of Paw Pals Animal Rescue, a shelter for stray cats in Shanghai.

Thome and Ma have been maintaining Lasso with the help of volunteers, and a few months ago they began making upgrades on the site. Among them, a better feedback mechanism that now allows users to rate organizations and leave comments.

A few organizations, however, do not include any contact information, so people wanting to get in touch will have to find their own way. The data apparently got lost from the site during some technical work last year.

The job of overseeing such improvements now falls on Erin Henshaw, a 27-year-old American who has been involved in volunteer work since her teens.

She already has her hands full as a manager at The Hutong cultural exchange center, but Henshaw took on Lasso's day-to-day management since she believes reaching out to those in need is one of life's necessities.

"If everyone did a little bit, the world would be much better," she says. And she knows that websites like Lasso and Volunteer Beijing are an important part of the equation.

You may contact the writer at tiffany@chinadaily.com.cn.

(China Daily 02/12/2012 page4)