There is a need to manage neighbor-helping-neighbor volunteers in Senior Villages (and similar). Senior Villages are mutual-support organizations, often without paid staff, which provide social, cultural, fitness, and household support to enable their members to stay in their homes and age gracefully. Many Villages have a volunteer clearinghouse for things like rides to the doctor, watering plants while the homeowner is away, friendly welfare check-ups, shoveling snow, etc. This is different from volunteers for fixed roles at fixed events. Maybe Civicase with an enhanced client/service match function would work. It is similar to a storefront, but for services, not products. It's actually kind of like Uber or AirB&B, where distributed producers provide distributed services through a clearing house.
What we need is:
- volunteer registration, with tags for skill set, certification
(background check, CPR, etc.), and availability, including vacation
absences.- service requests, including: type of service, time of service, locations (transport needs start and final destinations; round
trip?); special concerns ("needs help with stairs"; "must transport
wheelchair/walker"), etc. - provider/service match (including volunteer's past workload), query, and assignment
- mutual notification of client and provider
- confirmation, evaluation, and "lessons learned" feedback from both client and provider; time sheet logging
- performance reports for evaluation and recognition of outstanding performance ('cause we ain't paying the volunteers money)
- service requests, including: type of service, time of service, locations (transport needs start and final destinations; round
Thanks for any help.
Does anyone know of a module to do this, or can suggest one that might be modified? There are commercial apps that do some of this (Ride Scheduler, Club Express), but not all and which are not readily customizable the way Civi is. Without a staff, we need to embed as much paperwork and process expertise in the system as possible. As the population ages, but doesn't die or go into care, this is potentially a big market.