Pasadena Educational Foundation Uses Track It Forward Beyond The Pandemic
Customized Profile
Quick Response Time
Event Calendar
How Track It Forward Helped Pasadena Educational Foundation Respond Quickly During COVID-19
When COVID-19 hit, many organizations struggled to maintain operations. This has been especially true for nonprofit organizations and schools. The Pasadena Educational Foundation (PEF) is a nonprofit organization that focuses on supporting the Pasadena public schools, so when the pandemic hit they had to pivot quickly.
With the help of Track it Forward software, PEF has been able to implement and encourage volunteer programs with COVID-19 safety precaution guidelines in place.
What is Pasadena Educational Foundation?
The Pasadena Educational Foundation supports the Pasadena Unified School District by raising funds in the form of individual, corporate, government, and foundation grants and through community outreach. Each year they raise $12-$15 million to go toward the Pasadena Unified School district.
Pasadena Education Foundation’s vision is “every Pasadena Unified School District student will receive an excellent education so that each may reach his or her full potential and become a joyful and fully engaged member of our democratic society.”
Community Engagement and Volunteer Manager Nancy Carol Inguanzo explains how important of a role volunteers play in the success of Pasadena Educational Foundation: “We have to rely on our volunteers to round out what we do. We have volunteers who help us with grant research, volunteers who help us with events, and volunteers come in to do things at specific schools. One of the reasons we are able to do so much is because we have the help of community volunteers and an incredible volunteer board who put in a lot of hours for us.”
Pasadena Educational Foundation Programs
PEF separates the different programs they run in four different categories: In the Classroom, Grants & Awards, Health & Wellbeing, and Outreach. Volunteers can work to help implement these programs, volunteer at events, be partners, or help raise money.
In the Classroom
PEF creates different educational programs that directly impact the classroom environment. The different programs include Summer Enrichment, My Masterpieces, Robotics, Math Academy, Open Stage, App Academy, and 3D Printers.
Grants & Awards
Pasadena Educational Foundation creates teacher grants, field trip grants, and scholarships. Annually, PEF awards $250,000 in grants to Pasadena teachers. Teachers apply for the grants to fund specific materials or lessons. For example, one teacher was recently awarded a grant to create a student-made ancient artifacts museum that would provide hands-on learning for her history classes.
Health & Wellbeing
Pasadena Educational Foundation works on creating wellness programs for children beyond their educational value. They support and create opportunities for students to learn how to be healthier. This includes school community gardens for better eating habits and recreation facilities in schools for activity use.
Outreach
The outreach category is for all of the community events and partnerships that the Pasadena Educational Foundation creates. There are a variety of events that PEF plans, participates in, and sponsors. These include activities such as Principal for a Day and Realtor Initiative.
Volunteering During the Pandemic with the Pasadena Educational Foundation
As the pandemic hit, Pasadena Educational Foundation was met with many obstacles. There were no more in-classroom opportunities and events were not going to easily be planned. But, the whole mission of the Pasadena Educational Foundation is to provide for students, no matter what. Quickly, PEF mobilized to help the schools during the pandemic.
From March, PEF almost doubled the number of volunteers that were anticipated they’d need to help PEF’s initiatives. During the pandemic, PEF volunteers went on to prepare thousands of learning kits for kids at home and to deliver more than 600,000 curbside meals to families in need.
PEF started a COVID-19 Response Fund to allow donations to be made in support of feeding PUSD students and families, utilizing 3D printers to create face shields, and giving educational technology support to those who need it to participate in virtual learning.
PEF and PUSD came together to organize meal delivery services to students who relied on school meals to get fed throughout the day. These volunteers could volunteer as little or as often as they want. PEF volunteers met at the school site with masks on and helped organize meals to pass out curbside to families.
This opportunity was created with donations from area businesses. Volunteers deliver learning materials to PUSD Families. PEF provides the volunteers with sterile gloves and there is no physical contact.
This can be a family activity or an individual activity for volunteers. Volunteers help with the upkeep of the educational community gardens. PEF limits the sign-up to 10 people per garden, they must socially distance, bring their own gloves and gardening tools, and wear masks.
Summer Enrichment Program (Virtual)
This program is usually offered every summer by Pasadena Educational Foundation but was forced to go virtual in 2020. Summer enrichment lessons were offered for free in video form viva newsletters linked to a special, summer website - PEFSummer.org.
Senior to Senior Program (Virtual)
Starting in June, public school students in the Pasadena area were offered the opportunity to help bridge the gap between the elderly and the youth by maintaining a relationship with a senior citizen from the community. This pilot program was launched with stay-at-home protocols in mind. High school students can earn community service hours virtually.
Good Vibes Volunteer (Virtual)
As many students, families, and teachers are having a tough time through this pandemic, PEF is striving to create a positivity chain. Volunteers in this program will help spread positive words, attributes, quotes, and stories to the community weekly. PEF provides prompts and messages that each volunteer should promote.
Pasadena Educational Foundation and Track It Forward
PEF used to use a large and more cumbersome software to manage volunteers that was difficult to navigate. “We needed something that was more nimble, quick and easy for people to sign up, with a low barrier to entry, and Track it Forward really fit the bill on that,” Nancy Carol explains. She wanted software that would take little maintenance after set-up and provide volunteers an hour log process and event calendar.
With Track It Forward, she has been able to combine all of her volunteer hour-logging into one place. Also, she likes the ease of the reporting tool. Nancy Carol can extract hours from specific programs quickly to show to a grant writer. This quickens up the process for their grant writer to produce the grants that will help the school systems!
In late February of 2020, Nancy Carol decided to try Track It Forward for her organization and originally planned to slowly ease into the software. However, their offices shut down on March 13 at the start of the pandemic and they had to pivot quickly. She attributes their success in remote volunteer programs in part to Track it Forward software. “PEF was ready to meet the moment, and in my mind one of the things that helped was Track it Forward,” Nancy Carol says.
“We are using Track It Forward in ways that I never anticipated, I was really thankful that it was easy to use.”
Using Track It Forward During the Pandemic
As COVID-19 forced schools to go to remote learning, PEF was instantly brought into action.
Nancy Carol says, “When everything got turned on its head, and we had to all stay at home, the first thing that happened was the school district turned into a hub for distributing meals for families.”
Meals were to be given out to any and all families who needed them through a federally-subsidized program. However, many district food service employees who were at higher risk of contracting COVID-19 could not work. This is where PEF sprung to action. PEF garnered volunteers to help pass out meals via a Curbside Volunteer program.
“I was able to get those meal site options up on the software within a few hours. It is easy for the volunteers to sign up; it is easy for me to manage; it is intuitive. All of these things were key to helping volunteers get meals to families that needed them.”
Feature Spotlight: Events Calendar
Nancy Carol started to make use of the event calendar in Track It Forward right away. She was able to upload the curbside events and have volunteers RSVP to work these stations.
Nancy Carol says using this calendar has helped her plan out volunteer options and the curbside locations in a simple manner.
By using the event calendar, Nancy Carol has been able to use Track It Forward in a database way to help with volunteer management.
When a volunteer RSVPs to the event, they get a reminder sent to their email before the event, and they receive a reminder email to log their hours when the event is over.
This saves Nancy Carol time in reminding the volunteers and in having to feel responsible for who shows up. She says, “It’s been very flexible, and it has enabled us to actually make things happen instead of thinking okay, how am I going to set this up to make this happen.”
Nancy Carol also takes advantage of hour approval features. She can go in and approve when people log their hours. It is essential to have accurate hour counts for PEF due to their use of this data in reports to gain funding via grants.
As people were stuck inside, Nancy Carol knew getting out into the community would be good for volunteers and for the schools, so Help in the Garden was reinstated under the guidance of the Pasadena Health Department.
Nancy Carol says, “We want to make as many opportunities available to the students that we are trying to support.”
To coincide with these new programs, she decided to customize the profile fields in Track It Forward.
Feature Spotlight: Customized Profile Field
When a volunteer signs up with Track It Forward, the admin of the website has the power to customize what questions are asked in their profile set-up. They also have the option to make certain questions mandatory.
This is exactly what Nancy Carol did. She set up the profile to show the ages of volunteers, and if they were under 18, they had to have parental or guardian approval to volunteer. This not only helped Nancy Carol when it came to organizing the volunteers but in the future, she will be able to use the email blast feature to send emails out to the volunteers based on their profile.
For example: if she has a donation marketing email, she will not send this to the students because she does not want to ask students to donate money.
The Pasadena Educational Foundation’s outreach efforts are a great example of an organization persevering through the pandemic and maintaining their mission. When schools returned to in-person classes in 2021, many of the volunteer programs returned to in-person work as well. They do still utilize some of the virtual options created during the pandemic, such as volunteer training or their recent participation in the Read Across America program.
Nancy Carol says: “Track It Forward makes my job easier. I can focus more outwardly on partnerships and volunteers rather than having to spend countless hours on a program trying to get things set up. Therefore, more things are getting done because I do not have to focus on the software. It frees up your time. That’s really what you want software to do. You want it to be intuitive so you don’t have to spend time learning how to use it. It is supposed to make your job easier.”