Detroit Rescue Mission Ministries
Location: Detroit, Michigan
Annual Number of Volunteers: 5,600
Detroit Rescue Mission Ministries (DRMM) is the largest homeless shelter complex in the nation and provides more than 160,000 nights of emergency shelter for homeless men, women, and children. Annually, they serve over 1,000,000 meals to the homeless and hungry at seven facilities located throughout Detroit and Highland Park, Michigan. Additionally, DRMM is ranked as the 13th largest substance abuse treatment program in the nation by US News and World Report.
Coordinating 5,600 volunteers at Seven Locations across Detroit
DRMM’s volunteer coordinator, Marci Fitch, has the challenging task of scheduling volunteers at seven distinct locations across Detroit, seven days a week, 365 days a year. “CERVIS enables our volunteers to go to our website and see our volunteer needs and easily sign up online for the exact date, time and location they want to serve at.” Since volunteers can do all of this online without a single phone call to Marci, she has been freed up to focus on other important aspects of her job. “I can now quickly send updated daily schedules to each of our seven sites and no longer have to mail them, which would make them outdated by the time they arrived.”
Ease of Scheduling Large Groups of Volunteers
DRMM’s volunteer efforts are successful due to the 330 groups who volunteer to serve meals to the hungry throughout Detroit. These groups include local businesses, church groups, high school and college groups, and celebrity casts, including Days of Our Lives cast members.
As volunteer managers know, groups can be both a blessing and a curse. On one hand, they provide an organization with a large number of volunteers, but on the other hand, they are tough to keep track of, coordinate, and communicate with. Marci needed a solution to ease her stress and enable her to easily register groups to volunteer and quickly communicate with the group leaders and seven site coordinators. CERVIS’s robust Group Management feature enables DRMM to coordinate, schedule and register groups, all while maintaining up-to-date group contact information. She is even able to pull Reports by Groups so she can report the number of volunteers and volunteer hours served for each group.