Resilient Greenfield uses GivePulse Volunteer Management. “Volunteering” is the agency-organized form of “mutual aid”. Many of us remember the efforts of Stone Soup, Franklin County Community Co-Op, and other local agencies as they attempted to use the web to connect people with needs to people with offers to meet needs. It was challenging to make this process secure (how do you get someone to walk your dog while you’re in the hospital without giving out your contact info?) and user friendly (a website that is not also a mobile app cannot be reached by some people, and even for those who can, an online database or spreadsheet can be hard to use.)
GivePulse, the software platform adopted by Resilient Greenfield, offered a secure, accessible and elegant solution for people offering to provide help, and is run by a service-driven company that responds quickly to new needs.
The video below shows how with GivePulse, people were able to find volunteer opportunities that matched their skills and availability. People with needs still had to find the right organization to help them, of course, and there were many web pages on the City of Greenfield, Community Action and other sites that listed which organizations were available to do what, and how to contact them.
Resilient Greenfield formed to address the volunteer service gap that appeared after those volunteers went back to work, but community needs did not return to pre-Pandemic levels. There are two dimensions to this: the ongoing gap between active volunteers and needs, and predictable emergency situations like new epidemics and extreme weather events that climate change is guaranteed to deliver more often than we’ve already seen. With Resilient Greenfield’s adoption of GivePulse, we can address both dimensions as we increase the number of active working-age volunteers, make it easier for them to find and be found by organizations with needs that fit their skills and interests, and offer a focal point for new organizations that emerge quickly to meet the needs of a crisis.