Words from our founder, five years in.
“I started TOHP believing my friends and I could help nonprofits. Five years later, it surprised me that we didn’t just get volunteers — we built a community that keeps showing up.”
That’s how our founder, Madelene Ortega (Madz as she’s fondly called by her friends), put it when we asked her to reflect on half a decade of TheOneHourProject. It’s a simple sentence, but it holds half a decade of hope in action, one hour at a time.
The plan, back then, was simple- get a few friends together, lend an hour to nonprofits that needed help. Nothing more ambitious than that – hence the term “project”. What Madz didn’t plan for was that the hours would add up to something bigger than the help itself.
Five years later, the numbers alone are proof of momentum: over 500 volunteers across Singapore, the Philippines, and beyond, working with more than 100 organisations. But numbers were never really the point. The point was always what happened inside those hours.
And those hours went everywhere. In both Singapore and the Philippines, they went into mental health ecosystems, into helping 6,000 kids read, into supporting those lifting indigenous voices. Into learning online safety or presentation skills for domestic workers through partners like Uplifters.. There were volunteer hours poured into environmental advocacies right alongside helping community advocates bring seniors and youth into the conversation.
Five years in, TOHP is still doing what it’s always done — matching willing hands to real needs and . giving access to the best marketing and digital talents to nonprofits. We’ve had very experienced advertising executives to senior marketing or tech companies and inspiring creative directors from the world’s biggest companies giving their skills to purpose is what has also set TOHP apart.
A diverse set of highly skilled, best in their industry type of talent that are signing up and showing up as volunteers right alongside interns and fresh graduates. Diversity in skill and experience but with one shared purpose of making the world better an hour at a time. They are all our superpower.
Most of that work wasn’t visible, either. “Volunteer work isn’t always loud,” says Romina, our Content Manager. “It’s also the unseen but pivotal work of graphic design, writing and social media.” Community isn’t just built in the field — it’s built in newsletters drafted at midnight, carousels designed between calls, captions rewritten until they land. Nobody claps for that. It’s needed more than we know.
That’s the surprise Madz is talking about. TOHP set out to give organisations extra hands. What it built instead was a place where people kept coming back — because something in the giving gave something back, whether that hour was made drafting captions, storytelling for groundups or even doing accounting for a non-profit that badly needed the help!
And maybe that’s the real answer to what surprised her. She started with a belief in what her friends could do. She ended up watching a community take shape in a hundred quiet forms, across causes nobody could have predicted at the start — the kind that sometimes never makes it into a photo.
But it’s also become something none of us predicted at the start: a community that keeps choosing to show up, out loud and behind the scenes alike.
At half a decade, we’re just starting. If you’ve been thinking about it, this is your sign — hit our DMs, send us that email, and become part of hope in action.
