Civic Champs Wants to Help Pittsburgh’s Volunteer Initiatives with Tech Solutions
Civic Champs was founded in 2019 with a mission to deepen volunteer engagement in the nonprofit sector while helping nonprofits get back time to do the things that matter most. After attending Harvard business school and successfully exiting two companies, our founder and CEO Geng Wang decided he wanted his next venture to have scalable social impact, and so began the journey of Civic Champs. Team culture at Civic Champs surrounds our ethos of being relentlessly kind with a bias toward action in all facets of our work.
Civic Champs couldn’t be more thrilled to join the sixth cohort of startups participating in the PGH Lab program. Pittsburgh is a city our company feels could benefit greatly from our Helping Hands pilot program given the serious ramifications of the global pandemic on the ability of critical community nonprofits to execute their missions. Civic Champs is a social impact tech company that strives to amplify the impact of nonprofits by deepening volunteer engagement and streamlining the volunteer process.
Our Helping Hands initiative, the project we will be building out as a part of PGH Lab with our city champions, is a mobile platform that allows individuals in need of assistance to be matched with readily available volunteers in their area. The app was designed to be flexible, allowing nonprofits, mutual aid leaders, and residents to become directly involved with volunteers in the communities they serve.
Civic Champs is looking forward to bringing Pittsburgh leading edge technology that helps strengthen and foster community selflessness amongst neighbors. Our goal throughout this pilot program is to work with the support and guidance of the Pittsburgh Department of Innovation and Performance to help our partner nonprofits deploy volunteer resources rapidly and at scale. Civic Champs hopes to develop a positive, long-term relationship with the City of Pittsburgh while helping folks give back and find simple ways to connect with their communities to make sure fellow citizens are cared for.
In terms of implementation, Civic Champs will be continuing to iterate and better our existing Helping Hands software which was successfully rolled out and has been facilitating the delivery of volunteer tasks through our first pilot program in Bloomington, IN. Our original Civic Champs software was already helping nonprofits manage and track their volunteers, but the Covid-19 pandemic exacerbated existing challenges and created new hardships for organizations. We realized that the community needs that nonprofits were able to address in other circumstances were especially difficult to continue during a pandemic. Fewer people are able to leave their homes, move autonomously, pick up essential items, and execute home maintenance tasks. Our talented team of engineers built the Helping Hands platform in response to the impacts felt most from the pandemic to help make meeting community needs through volunteering that much more viable.
Our first step for our Pittsburgh program will be process mapping with our City Champions to hone in on how their volunteer management systems are operating now, and how Helping Hands can be deployed to address their most pressing pain points. For our Pittsburgh Helping Hands initiative we plan on leveraging our existing partnerships with nonprofits including United Way’s Open Your Heart to Seniors program, North Hill Community Outreach, and Wesley Family Services, in addition to partnering with the City of Pittsburgh’s Snow Angels and City Cuts programs to create greater impact across the entire region. Pittsburgh’s Snow Angels program pairs elderly residents and community members with disabilities with local volunteers who assist them in removing snow from their sidewalks and walkways. Similarly, Pittsburgh’s City Cuts program pairs residents who don’t have the means to take care of their lawns with neighbors who are willing to help them with outdoor maintenance.
Our pilot program will collaborate with the City’s 311 Response Center, run by the Department of Innovation and Performance, a public resource that handles non-emergency questions and concerns from city residents and is used to manage questions and troubleshoot problems that arise with Snow Angels and City Cuts. We will be working with the leaders of these government programs to transition and streamline the way volunteers are managed and matched to residents in need. Helping Hands will be launched with the goal of expanding the capacity of Snow Angels, City Cuts, and other volunteer initiatives to recruit and retain volunteers in high need neighborhoods in an effort to achieve equity in city volunteer programming.
Civic Champs’ goal for our Helping Hands pilot project is to help enable impactful nonprofits across Pittsburgh to execute volunteer tasks efficiently and at scale. We hope to facilitate an equitable balance between volunteers and neighbors in need, streamline the city’s process for volunteer management, and contribute to an efficient and impactful City Cuts program in 2021. More specifically we will be working to improve neighbor in need to volunteer match ratios for both Snow Angels and City Cuts.
We strive to foster strong relationships with our partner organizations and provide them with new, powerful tech tools to amplify their missions and take care of fellow community members. In addition to building towards extended cooperation with our nonprofit partners, we are incredibly excited to cultivate a long term partnership with the municipal government and City of Pittsburgh to ensure that Helping Hands becomes a staple here in the Steel City. Throughout the program our team will also strive to take full advantage of the consultant resources and guidance offered by PGH Lab; harnessing their expertise to optimize both our product and company operations. We’re especially excited to soak up and apply new insights related to digital marketing strategies and lean business structuring.
Our Pittsburgh Team:
Our Pittsburgh Team is a collection of startup leaders with varied skill sets that care deeply about facilitating positive social impact throughout the city. Our team consists of:
Michael Bernarding- Director of Customer Success- A Pittsburgh native with extensive experience in leadership within the nonprofit sector and a certificate in nonprofit leadership from the Harvard Kennedy school, Michael spearheads our growth initiatives.
Jess Ansel- Account Executive- A University of Pittsburgh graduate with 8+ years of experience in tech sales, Jess loves showing clients how our software can solve problems for their organizations.
Darcy Neureiter- Marketing Strategist- A Denver native who is now a proud Lawrenceville resident, Darcy has experience crafting media strategy within the social impact and civic tech space.
Jahonna Lipscomb- Customer Success Associate- A senior pursuing a degree in Political Science with a Law & Government concentration at Point Park University, Jahonna helps ensure that our nonprofit partners enjoy a seamless experience with our tech platform.
As of the end of 2020 Civic Champs is serving 61 nonprofits in 23 different states. We helped those nonprofits keep track of 47,930 volunteer hours executed by 4,058 volunteers across the country. Civic Champs is a Techstars portfolio company and was selected to compete in Techcrunch’s Startup Battlefield competition in San Francisco in 2019. Check out our CEO pitching Civic Champs on the national stage here and take a peek at our annual Benefit Report here.
Learn more about Civic Champs at https://civicchamps.com/ and follow us on LinkedIn to track our journey toward amplifying impact.
