Community Helper

My synagogue was about to organize a group of volunteers to help the elderly in picking up groceries and other messages that needed to get done for people who weren't/aren't in a position to help themselves. They were going to use a Google Doc to try to keep track of everything and I realized this wouldn't be an effective way of managing things, especially with a lot of volunteers and a lot of tasks coming in.

I considered using Trello to set things up, but it wouldn't be effective for each volunteer to quickly see which are assigned to them, without having to "manage" anything. I also figured that there might be a lot of other organizations with the same problem and no effective way of managing it, so it could be a great opportunity to create something great and do some real good.

So I built Community Helper.

I jumped into in right away and had a first version ready in about 2 days. To give some context to this timeframe, I'm currently the Director of Software Development in a tech company, I have 8 years experience as a Business Analyst gathering business requirements and creating specifications, 8 years as a Project Manager, 6 years as a Software Engineer and a Database Architect, 8 years in User Experience design, and 13 years in QA - the multi-disciplined experience obviously helped we create something of quality in a relatively short timespan.

At the time of writing this, I started building it 2 weeks ago from yesterday. I've also gotten an article posted about it in the newspaper The Post Millennial: https://www.thepostmillennial.com/community-helper-site-launches-to-help-neighbours

I've been making tons of adjustments from feedback in the field and more than 30 people from my synagogue have joined and are using it.

It think it can do some real good right now, at a time when it's really needed.