Background

Oakland, CA has been nationally recognized as one of America’s greenest cities, with initiatives and programs to encourage sustainability and environmental awareness among the city’s leaders, workforce, and citizenry. Oakland’s Public Works Agency is tasked with carrying out the maintenance of parks, creeks, streets, and buildings - all with environmentally-conscious methods and products.

The problem

With declining revenues and increasing expenses, the city has had to cut back funding of programs from schools to police to park maintenance. As a result, individuals and departments within the city have been turning to volunteers to help with basic maintenance and beautification tasks. Neighborhood volunteers have been essential in spearheading restoration and beautification activities in areas such as the Cleveland Cascade, the Morcom Rose Garden, and around Lake Merritt.

Previous methods for tracking volunteers involved multiple coordinators from different city departments using email, spreadsheets, and paper forms to report hours and activities. These methods don’t scale very well - and occasionally lead to confusion about which volunteers are responsible for which activities.

The City came to Track it Forward with the following questions:

• How can the volunteers be encouraged to participate yet work within the framework that the PWA is required to maintain?
• How should the city staff support and organize volunteers with minimal bureaucracy and budget?
• How can the city encourage transparency and accountability, both within the volunteer groups and the city workforce?

The Solution: Empowered City Staff + Neighbors + Track it Forward

One of the earliest supporters of Track it Forward was gardener Tora Rocha, who was tasked with maintaining the Morcom Rose Garden. As head gardener, she started a Master Volunteer program for rose enthusiasts. These Dedicated Deadheaders received training on roses, and are allowed to work in the garden unsupervised. They record their hours in Track it Forward, and use the system to communicate issues with the city staff, who is not able to attend fully to the Rose Garden.

When she was made a city Parks Supervisor, Tora took her experience with volunteers and deployed it at approximately 16 parks and gardens around the city. She runs weekly Saturday workdays, which involve individual volunteers and larger groups from schools, community, and corporate organizations. Hundreds of people come to clean parks, plant gardens, and participate in positive activities in their community.

Each of these parks and gardens have different levels of community support. For example, at the Lake Merritt Gardens, there is an active “Friends of the Lake Merritt Gardens” group which promotes and sustains the gardens. These volunteers track their own hours using Track it Forward, and have created a fairly detailed organization of gardens and tasks. At Defremery Park there isn’t a designated community leader (yet) so Tora is using Track it Forward’ Bulk Hours feature to track the activities of larger work parties.

Between individuals and groups, almost 2,000 volunteer hours were recorded during April and May 2011 within Tora’s region. This does not reflect a full accounting of all parks-related volunteering in the area, but it creates a visible incentive for people to visit their parks and participate with their community.

Results

• A publicly-accessible location for tracking and displaying volunteer activities taking place in Oakland’s parks makes individuals more likely to participate
• An active Public Works Supervisor can include monitoring and tracking volunteers into their weekly routine, thus increasing the efficiency of city staff who are responsible for coordinating and supporting volunteer efforts
• Individual community organizers have stepped up to monitor volunteers and enter data into Track it Forward