Congratulations to the individual and team winners of the 2023 Apparo Volunteer Appreciation and Impact Awards.
Individual winner: Jennifer Elliott (Centric Consulting)
Team winner: Sonya Baskin, Lavanya Devulapalli, Brad Richmond (Duke Energy)
At Apparo, we love our volunteers. If you’ve had the pleasure of working with one (or are just a big fan), you understand. This April, National Volunteer Month, we will be awarding the second annual Apparo Volunteer Appreciation and Impact Awards. They will be given to the Apparo volunteers whose support of their nonprofit partner is most inspirational to the community. The winners will be honored at a volunteer appreciation celebration in late April.
Please note the following voting rules:
- Anyone may vote for one winner in each category from among the nominations.
- Any individual may only vote once.
- Voting closes Friday 3/31.
The nominees…
Individual Award Nominees
Nominee: Jennifer Elliott, Centric Consulting
Nominated by: Kim Wheeler, Crisis Assistance Ministry Gastonia
Jennifer Elliott worked with CAM through a partnership through Apparo and Centric Consulting to build and implement Salesforce as our CRM. While the official project ended after a successful implementation, Jennifer has continued to assist CAM staff on a volunteer basis with ongoing support. Jenn’s assistance has been vital to our organization, as we have a very small staff and no IT support. Throughout our partnership she was attentive to our agency’s needs, and made adjustments whenever necessary.
Jenn’s ongoing volunteer support has been invaluable. She is not only responsive to our requests, but comes up with solutions that fine tune our processes. Her commitment to CAM is evident as she continues to really create a dynamic system to support our needs. We recently had one of the busiest months ever, in our 47 year history. The power of what Jenn and her team has created was on full display. To the efficiency of applying for our clients, to the agility to handle the flow and ultimately the reporting that allowed us to know day to day our financial commitments, our CRM built by Jenn is a game changer for our agency.
Nominee: Kevin McDonald, Hylaine
Nominated by: Samantha Filcik, The Foundation for Tomorrow
Kevin spent months working with us last year to help improve our website. Not only did he provide help with the technical side of things, he did additional research to advise us on some best practices on general aesthetics and how to make it more user friendly for people coming to our site. We started out with a few specific questions for him at the beginning of the partnership but left with so much more information than we even knew we needed. He went far beyond above and beyond and we are so grateful for him!
Nominee: Simon Pfister, Accenture
Nominated by: Lindsey Graves, Carolina Youth Coalition
Working with the Apparo and Accenture teams during our Mission Possible grant greatly impacted the ways in which we train our volunteers. Simon was a vital part of this process by keeping our team organized and lending expert opinions and structure to selecting a best-fit program. He brought in other Accenture team members to provide guidance and expand our knowledge base of learning and development training. His humor and patience meant a great deal to all of us on the team during the year-long project.
Nominee: Hannah Rietzel Rivera, Slalom Consulting
Nominated by: Bob Young, United Way of Greater Charlotte
Hannah was the team leader for the Slalom volunteers who worked with United Way to create our organizational Technology Assessment. Our technology infrastructure at United Way is very complicated, with business operations running on multiple systems that we have tried to adapt to our evolving resource development and community investment strategies. Hannah showed great patience and perseverance in taking the time to truly understand our processes – and the people running them – in order to make recommendations for improvements moving forward. At times, it seemed that Hannah understood us better than we understood ourselves. Our team thoroughly enjoyed working with her and learning from her.
Team Award Nominees
Nominees: Sonya Baskin, Lavanya Devulapalli, Brad Richmond (Duke Energy)
Nominated by: A.W. Burgess, Family Mankind
Their level of expertise was so needed as navigating the IT world in search for what we needed was a foreign language to us. They provided the best advice and solutions for me as a leader to make the best decision for our company.
Nominees: Sandra Byrd, Bernard Neely, Kevin Riddle, Jovan Talbert (Ally Financial)
Nominated by: Darryl Bego, Youth Development Initiatives
The Ally Financial Team met with YDI each week for six months and did the following:
– Listened intently to our technological issues and challenges.
– Strategically suggested doable IT solutions to address our challenges.
– Skillfully guided us through an implementation process that has since streamlined our administrative operations and strengthened our internal communications – saving us finite time, money, and resources!
Nominees: Stephen Christiansen (Stratascale) & Craig Cooksey (Accenture)
Nominated by: Kami Biastes, Present Age Ministries
Craig & Stephen began helping us last year and have been phenomenally helpful. Their efforts will exponentially multiply our impact in the communities that we reach. Craig has had role changes and Stephen has had employment shifts to a different company, and both have consistently partnered with us to ensure that we are progressing on developing a virtual training platform.
Nominees: Zack Harris, Jamie Jones, Sreedevi Purini and Espoir Tomenou (Duke Energy)
Nominated by: Paul Reali, Charlotte Center for Literary Arts
Charlotte Lit needed help finding web-based Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software for that had strong and flexible member management, and which prioritized events and event management rather than donations. We had done our own search two years prior, but the solution we chose was not effective. We needed to try again but could not afford to make another very costly mistake. The Duke Energy team provided the hours and expertise our small team didn’t have, to help us clarify and prioritize our needs, to conduct the vendor search, to set up demos, and to help us evaluate. Zack and the team engaged with energy and enthusiasm, spending the necessary time to truly understand our unique business needs. Six months down the road, I am certain we got it right this time. I can say for certain that we could not — and would not — have done this without them.
Nominees: Lee Gantt (OptML), Ryan Jessop (OptML) and Stephanie Tysinger (Cox Communications)
Nominated by: Mike Orum, Rebuilding Together – Atlanta
Our three month engagement with Lee, Ryan and Stephanie has set Rebuilding Together Atlanta up for success in achieving both short and long term strategic operational goals. The engagement came at the most pivotal time for our organization. RTA experienced leadership changes with our Executive Director position during the engagement, and the recommendations outlined from the teams will provide a guidebook for our new Executive Director that will have an immediate impact. What a gift.
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