Community Development
for All People
Scaling Services While Saving Time
Meet Jess
Jess Grady is the Director of Healthy Eating and Living (HEAL) at CD4AP, and coordinates the volunteers for their All People’s Fresh Market and Linden Market. She also manages a team of people who keep the program running, oversees the programming they offer at each market location, and writes grants to fund the program and maintain their partnerships. Jess has been with HEAL for 3 years, starting in 2019 as an AmeriCorps VISTA.
“POINT has saved me 15 hours a week on volunteer management. We’re a small team and we are so thankful for their help.”
Meet the Nonprofit
Community Development for All People (CD4AP) is an organization founded by the United Methodist Church in Columbus, Ohio, to create a whole, healthy, and engaged community. They collaborate with other local partners to boost the quality of life for residents, and their services span a free store, food pantry, affordable housing, haircuts, tax assistance, and sooo much more. They have been working for nearly 20 years to improve the wellbeing of the community in the South Side of Columbus.
Jess needed to recruit to keep up with demand.
During the beginning of the pandemic, food access nonprofits across the country saw a major increase in demand. Columbus was no different—the All People’s Fresh Market supplied food to over 600 families in the first few weeks of COVID. Seeing demand spike meant that Jess needed to scale services, and volunteers, just as quickly. But with new precautions to keep volunteers healthy, Jess said that they needed to recruit over 3x their normal amount of volunteers to serve the community safely. Before the pandemic, CD4AP had about 30 unique volunteers each month which spiked to over 200 per month in 2020. POINT enabled Jess to quickly and easily find the fresh faces she needed to keep the market up
and running.
“POINT allows us to reach a larger audience of people who are willing to help than we would through our own recruitment efforts. POINT is the tool we needed during COVID to find low-risk volunteers.”
POINT enabled Jess to scale operations
during a crisis.
Like many coordinators, Jess had been tracking volunteers on a spreadsheet and doing individual outreach to schedule them before the pandemic. That simply wasn’t cutting it once CD4AP needed to rapidly scale volunteering efforts and sustain them. POINT gave Jess a way to both recruit and manage all of her volunteers at a much larger scale while actually saving time. All Jess had to do was post opportunities, and volunteers could see and easily sign up for shifts right in the app!
“Before I found out about POINT, volunteers emailed or called me to sign up for shifts and I kept track of the schedule in a spreadsheet. POINT has largely increased our capacity as an organization because it allows us a simple way to schedule volunteers for our market.”
Simplifying management saved Jess time and sanity.
Coordinating volunteers manually, running the markets, writing grants, engaging with the community, and doing the million other things that nonprofit leaders do takes a ton of time and energy. By switching to POINT, Jess was able to drastically cut the hours needed to manage volunteers, enabling her team to focus on other operations that enable the All People’s Fresh Market to more meaningfully serve their community. With a small team and a loooot to do, she’s thankful that POINT makes everyone’s jobs easier.
