A Fresh Cut for Community Service
Civic Champs is giving community service a new look and helping residents; here are their insights from their experience with the PGH Lab 6.0 cohort.
How was your experience with PGH Lab, and why Community Cuts?
It has been an absolute joy working over these past six plus months within PGH Lab’s 6th cohort. The Civic Champs team was able to gain valuable insight into what it means to contract for city government and the obstacles and unique impact that civic tech can have. Community Cuts, our pilot project executed in collaboration with the City of Pittsburgh’s Mayor’s Office of Community Affairs, is a technology-based volunteer program that strives to help facilitate the connection between neighbors in need and those willing to lend a hand with yard maintenance.
The Community Cuts program was formed based on an increasing need from residents for help with basic property maintenance to meet city code. The City’s winter volunteer programs like Snow Angels require extensive time and coordination across departments and staff requiring rigorous labor where capacity is already low. In addition to the logistical complexities and time cost of organizing volunteer programs, City Cuts, the original program formed to address lawn care needs, lost funding due to Covid-19 without a replacement of services. Thus, Community Cuts was created over the six-month PGH Lab program to create an intuitive, tech-based volunteer management solution for the City of Pittsburgh to execute volunteer efforts, help residents with grass maintenance, and promote strength and kindness in Pittsburgh communities.
What did you learn while you were a part of PGH Lab?
The PGH Lab program facilitated plenty of learning moments for the Civic Champs team as we explored the challenges and triumphs of implementing new technology with local government entities. While working with the Pittsburgh Mayor’s office of Community Affairs, we learned that the City’s process across existing volunteer programs is highly manual and labor intensive involving coordination among many departments. This observation affirmed the relevance of a software product like Civic Champs that solves inefficiency problems for government projects like volunteer programming.
While developing our pilot program we also were privy to the thought process and various considerations that contribute to city projects including neighborhood selection. Governmental work often includes several complex social and political factors which is one of the reasons intuitive technology solutions can be so useful within the sector and is also why solution building can be a slow process. Throughout our PGH Lab pilot our team also learned that volunteers are used by many departments across the City of Pittsburgh and as of right now, there is no single platform or centralized structure to manage and engage with folks who are a part of these programs. The volunteer training sessions we offered to onboard interested Pittsburgh neighbors turned out to be wonderful places to receive feedback and ideate on our product further as a result of the thoughtful questions from attendees.
What did you achieve while you were in PGH Lab?
The goals outlined on our original project charter were impacted by time constraints as we worked with the Mayor’s office of community affairs to figure out how our technology could best serve them. Snow Angels, the city’s snow removal volunteer program, happens in the winter when we were still in product development mode, so we were not able to test our product during February or March of 2021 as the winter ended. Providing a volunteer management solution for City Cuts became our primary focus for our six-month pilot program.
We created a promotional splash page and branding around our Community Cuts initiative, worked in conjunction with the City of Pittsburgh to promote the program to volunteers and recipients, and hosted six virtual volunteer information sessions to answer participant questions. We served dozens of residents across two City Council Districts engaging several volunteers after hosting multiple volunteer onboarding trainings putting in over one hundred hours between the Civic Champs and Mayor’s Office of Community Affairs to execute the logistics of the project.
Any final thoughts and acknowledgements?
The entire team at Civic Champs wants to offer our immense gratitude to the Mayor’s Office of Community Affairs and our patience, positive, and insightful city champions Leah Friedman and Gisele Betances. Leah and Gisele’s collaboration on this project was our primary conduit for learning about the complicated task of fostering civic engagement in cities and they were a joy to learn from and work with.
As this Summer ends, Civic Champs is excited to consider the ways in which we can continue and expand our volunteer pilot project. Ideally our Community Cuts model can be applied successfully to Snow Angels as well to continue connecting neighbors in need to residents with a desire to serve their community. PGH Labs provided Civic Champs with a unique opportunity to manifest our vision in a new sector and continue to execute our mission of creating the most intuitive and impactful volunteer management software for impactful organizations and their champions. Our long-term vision of success is still to create a streamlined volunteer management system for the City of Pittsburgh that is being used by residents with an equitable balance between volunteers and neighbors in need.
This content was curated with responses from the Civic Champs team. Civic Champs is a startup that served as member of PGH Lab’s 6th cohort. PGH Lab is a program run by the Civic Innovation team which is housed in the City of Pittsburgh’s Department of Innovation and Performance. You can learn more about Civic Champs here.
