YVC and MilkCrate
App Overview and Performance
From our company’s earliest days, MilkCrate has had the honor and privilege of working with some truly amazing organizations, Youth Volunteer Corps (YVC) being one of them. YVC is a network of affiliated organizations across the U.S. and Canada and their mission is to create volunteer opportunities to address community needs and to inspire youth for a lifetime commitment to service. They are passionate about giving young people the necessary tools and resources to become successful volunteers. The YVC program has 5 “focus areas” they teach to their volunteers. Those areas being Education, Stem & Environment, Healthy Lifestyles, Compassionate Communities, and Arts. To enhance the YVC volunteer experience MilkCrate developed an app to benefit program participants in various ways:
List of Volunteering Opportunities- Users can view and sign up for upcoming events
Service Reflection- Students can write about their experience and what was most meaningful to them
Communicate via Activity feed and Chat- Each user has a profile and can chat with one another
Access all YVC reading materials- Students can find any Service Learning Unit on any of the 5 “focus areas” to read
Fill out volunteering forms- Users can easily complete and submit the required volunteer forms in app
Ways in which the app helps YVC admin:
Reach the Volunteers with Push Notifications- Alert the users to complete a challenge, answer a poll question, or view new volunteer opportunity
User Data Charts- Track volunteer activity through charts
Track Social Emotional Growth- Provide users with surveys to track their individual growth
“MilkCrate immediately jumped in and helped us rethink and implement a new version of our app so that we could best serve our youth and the community during the COVID-19 crisis. Our youth volunteers have access to weekly projects, virtual meetings, and ongoing initiatives thanks to the MilkCrate app. I am grateful to the entire MilkCrate team for being ready and willing to help in a challenging and uncertain time for everyone.”
Our App During COVID
Due to the ongoing COVID 19 pandemic, YVC and MilkCrate have been making the necessary adjustments to ensure the YVC mission is continued in these times of social distancing. Prior to the pandemic, the YVC In-School program required students to meet weekly as a group to discuss their progress. These in-person meetings right now are not possible. Thankfully with the app, students and student advisors are able to meet with one another virtually. We give users a schedule for when the virtual meetings are, the option to RSVP, as well as keep track of the ones they missed/attended. Users can also use the app to chat with each other privately or as a group.
YVC Philly makes the recipe submitted by one of our alumni for the Students Rebuild Hunger Challenge. See the app in action starting at 3:11 in the video!
“When we started remote/virtual programming due to COVID-19, we realized the importance of having a tool that will provide seamless communication with and service-learning content to our youth volunteers. Partnering with MilkCrate for our app, we are grateful to be that much closer to rolling out this technology in order to retain, recruit and track the youth in our program. This investment demonstrates our commitment to youth engagement despite very real barriers and will produce the analytics to legitimize our work and increase sustainability.”
What the Future Holds
We are very excited at the directions both MilkCrate and YVC are headed towards. Our partnership began with YVC Philadelphia and we are now extremely happy to be working with YVC of Hampton Roads in Virginia. In the near future we hope to utilize a more advanced form of data storage known as “YDat”. It is the custom volunteer management database YVC currently uses to track their volunteers, hours, and project. We are working on a method to send the app’s participation data into YDat. Having MilkCrate app data and YDat data in a centralized database would greatly enhance the app’s capabilities and allow for even more important volunteer data to be collected. In addition to this we are also working on creating a seamless system to track service reflections and a feature that allows students to earn badges if they complete the requirements in a service-learning unit.