Calgary Reads Coordinates Volunteers to Change their Community
Calgary Reads is an early literacy initiative changing the lives of struggling grade 1 and 2 readers and their families in Calgary and area schools through early intervention. Calgary Reads is also taking steps to educate the importance of language through reading, singing, playing and talking, as building blocks to literacy, for newborns through to kindergarten. Realizing that literacy starts with language means realizing that even a toddler or preschooler is getting ready to read.
Today, our spotlight shines on Janica Fisher, Calgary Reads Events Coordinator, who uses VolunteerSpot's online signup sheets to coordinate volunteers for the program.
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Please tell us about your organization and your volunteer needs.
Calgary Reads helps struggling little students (k-grade 2) develop their reading skills. It is our goal to have every child read with confidence and joy! We promote the importance of literacy by working with children, their parents and the schools to develop and strengthen this essential skill. We do this through a variety of programs. Our largest program trains volunteers to work one on one with children assessed as having difficulty reading. We recruit, train and place hundreds of volunteers every school year. 
Our other large need for volunteers is our annual book sale, which is also our biggest fundraiser. Held each May, we count on the support of over 400 volunteers to ensure the book sale is a success. This year volunteers put in 3,946 hours of planning, collecting, sorting and selling books donated by the generosity of Calgarians.
As with many organizations, our success is dependent upon our volunteers. We are so lucky to have a passionate, committed group of volunteers!
Explain how you use VolunteerSpot to coordinate these volunteers.
This was the first year we used VolunteerSpot. We set up shifts for our book sale volunteers. We needed a system that enabled us to offer different types of volunteer roles and different times over a 2-month period.
What’s one piece of advice you have for volunteers or their leaders out there?
Everyone is busy. As a volunteer leader you must keep it simple, clear and flexible. VolunteerSpot allows a simple way to learn and sign on to shifts with the flexibility of changing or cancelling shifts as needed. It empowers volunteers and thus shifts the task of maintaining schedules from the staff directly to the volunteers.
Why did you decide to use VolunteerSpot?
We used VolunteerSpot because we needed a system that allowed the volunteer to control how and when and where they wanted to volunteer. This service saved the staff HOURS of work.
Anything else you’d like our readers to know?
Encourage your members to collaborate with each other; we are stronger in numbers and more effective for all when we do that.
Jill Andres, Director of the program, agreed that "VolunteerSpot was great, and I loved the videos. The reason I chose it was because it was the only tool that was just for volunteers. It was simple (so many scheduling tools are very complicated and have so many features that we didn’t need), it was free and even the paid version is inexpensive, and the best part was it didn’t require anyone to have an account and they could make changes to their shifts themselves!"
To learn more about the program, visit www.calgaryreads.com.
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We salute Janica and all the other volunteer leaders out there making a difference. If you're using VolunteerSpot, write and tell us about what you're doing and give us a chance to shine our Volunteer Spotlight on you!! Just email us at [email protected].
