Volunteering for Good
On the 10-year anniversary of Force for Good, we look behind the scenes at our latest project to support an innovative nonprofit’s mission to feed families in New York.
By: Steve Coupet, Executive Director at JPMorgan Chase and Force for Good Volunteer Project Lead for Grassroots Grocery
More than 10 years ago, JPMorgan Chase kicked off a program called Force for Good — a way for our tech teams to volunteer their skills and time in support of community organizations. During the last decade, the program has partnered with more than 700 nonprofits across the globe. In 2023 alone, we completed more than 150 projects.
To mark this milestone year, I want to share a behind the scenes look on a project with a New York City- based nonprofit, Grassroots Grocery.
We start by framing the issue
Food insecurity is a growing problem in New York City; it is estimated that it impacts more than 1.2 million residents per year. Dan Zauderer founded Grassroots Grocery, a fast-growing nonprofit, to help address this issue when he learned that many New Yorkers experiencing a food emergency lack access to a food pantry. The organization’s mission is to harness the power of volunteers to expand dignified access to food in the heart of the community. Currently, Grassroots Grocery reaches nearly 2,000 families per week with fresh produce throughout Upper Manhattan, Harlem and the Bronx — and is poised to reach many more. Rohan Amin, Chief Product Officer for Chase, and his family also volunteer with Grassroots Grocery.
The organization was a great candidate for our team because there are two operational areas that could benefit from technology — how they manage volunteers, and how they manage donors.
The Force for Good team began the evaluation of Grassroots Grocery’s needs. Our process goes like this:
We identify the need
In speaking with the organization, we identified two priority areas focused on donor experiences and volunteer management. Firm leaders Vaughn Harvey and Dan O’Donnell signed on to anchor the project and divided the team into two groups, each dedicated to these journeys.
The Force for Good donor track, led by Dan, entails implementing a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system so Grassroots Grocery’s founder can better track new funds, organize donor data, and seamlessly communicate with donors. The volunteer management track, led by Vaughn, also aims to implement a CRM system focused on organizing a growing base of volunteers to pick up excess food from local restaurants, institutions and households — and deliver it to community fridges, providing anonymous and dignified access to food for neighbors in need facing food insecurity.
Firm volunteers aligned to the Force for Good program donate about 4 hours per week to the project until completion, or 10% of their time.
We collaborate with the organization
Our Force for Good teams came together — comprised of about a dozen employees — to work on both projects with me as the donor track Team Lead and Radik Tadiashvili as the volunteer track Team Lead.
We invited the Grassroots Grocery team to our offices for a discovery session. Dan’s passion shined through when he spoke about witnessing food insecurity in his classrooms when working as a Bronx middle school teacher and how these experiences incentivized him to create Grassroots Grocery. The energy in the room was palpable; as the conversations unfolded, we knew we were signing up to achieve one unified goal of bridging the gap between excess and need.
We develop a project roadmap and select the tech platform
After a few weeks of intense discovery conversations, we were able to narrow in on the key features we wanted to prioritize and implement for the donor and volunteer systems. We reviewed several different tech tools and platforms from a cost and sustainability standpoint and determined a ‘true cost of ownership’ chart for each of the options. From there, we worked with the Grassroots Grocery team to decide on the tech platform for these two solutions. We still have work to do. Like any business project, we have built a project roadmap and have regular check-ins as we continue to work on the project over the next few months.
We get to work
Our teams meet weekly to align on the backlog and provide ongoing updates on the projects to the Grassroots Grocery team. We are now at the mid-point milestone of the project and are excited for the next steps in this exciting partnership and project.
So, Force for Food…. I mean Good…is off and running! The next few months will focus on building a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) for the two project tracks and helping Dan Zauderer and his team get up to speed on how to use and maintain the solutions–so check back to learn more about how the projects unfold.
You can also read more about Force for Good and other projects we have completed here.
Thanks to all the volunteers who have kept this program going for 10 years!
To learn more about Grassroots Grocery and opportunities to get involved, click here.
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