Car washes, bake sales and handwritten cards, run by students in their own towns across 20+ countries. One form to register, and every assignment counts toward community service hours.
There is one registration form and no interview. Once you have filled it in, a team lead gets in touch and puts you on whatever the chapter nearest you is running that month. In practice that is one of three things.
The car washes the organisation is named after. You wash, dry and detail cars for a few hours on a weekend, and the money goes straight through. This is Young Detailers, and it is where most people start.
Bake sales, drives, school events. Less equipment, more organising: finding a table, getting the word out, standing behind it for an afternoon. The money raised funds MCAS research and patient support.
Sitting down with a stack of blank cards and writing them for patients you will not meet. They go to 23 hospitals in nine countries, and they are read in rooms where very little else arrives by hand. The programme is MCAS Card Services.
You are not asked to choose between them when you register. Chapters run what they can run that month, and most volunteers end up doing all three over a year.
A chapter bake sale. Every dollar on that table goes to research and patient support.
Nobody arrives knowing anything about mast cell activation syndrome. Most volunteers had never heard the name before someone explained it to them, which is close to the whole problem: it is a condition people wait seven to ten years to have named.
So there is no test and no quota. You can come to one car wash and stop, or run your chapter's whole calendar. What the organisation needs is people who turn up on the day they said they would.
If you want to read the condition up properly before you start, this is what MCAS is. It is not required, and plenty of people pick it up as they go.
If there is no chapter near you, that is the other way in: start one. It is a separate form and a slightly longer conversation.
15,542 people have volunteered since 2021.
They run more than a hundred chapters in over twenty countries. Between them they have written over ten thousand cards for patients, and raised more than $150,000 for mast cell activation syndrome research and patient support.
None of that was the plan. In 2021 this was one high schooler detailing cars in a driveway in Illinois, and the rest is what happened when other students asked whether they could do it where they lived. Our story covers how that went.
A chapter is usually a handful of people at one school, so you are not joining a head office. You are joining whoever is nearest you. The full count, and what each figure covers, is on the impact page.
Every assignment is eligible for community service hours. Hours are tracked in your assignment log as you go, and a verified letter of service is issued on request — so the paperwork exists when a school or an application asks for it.
Accepted for NHS, IB and school service requirements.
Hours are for work actually done. The letter states what you did and when.
One form for every kind of assignment. Fill it in and a team lead will contact you with your first one — which chapter, what they are running, and when.
If you would rather give than go, the same work is funded by donations. If you are a patient or a parent rather than a volunteer, the programmes themselves are set out on the programs page, and what the work has added up to since 2021 is on our impact page.
Register to volunteer →