Ally skilled volunteers assisted Youth Development Initiatives with process improvement and selecting an application to safely store and teach their curriculum.
Youth Development Initiatives (YDI) provides caring adult connections and life guidance to disadvantaged adolescent youth. YDI scholars engage in an individualized development process that combines project-based learning applications with real-world learning experiences to build critical life skills, career planning, and post-secondary education preparedness. YDI depends on teachers to help with the curriculum for the programs offered to teens in Charlotte and three counties surrounding our community, and recently came to us requesting assistance with process improvement.
Darryl Bego, the President and CEO of YDI, came to Apparo seeking process improvement around how they stored and taught their CTE (Career-Technical-Education)-formatted curriculum. YDI was utilizing thumb drives to store curriculum. This process included purchasing the thumb drives, downloading curriculum to them, and distributing them to the instructors.
The use of thumb drives created several pain points:
- Lost or stolen thumb drives posed a security risk for proprietary information.
- Updating curriculum required travel on the part of the instructors or a YDI staff member to physically upload the new curriculum to the drive.
- Communication between YDI and instructors was not a streamlined process.
- There was no efficient way to teach curriculum remotely, making it difficult for YDI to expand their reach beyond the four counties they currently serve.
YDI requested assistance in identifying a safer and more efficient way to store and teach curriculum. Apparo matched them with skilled volunteers to assess their process and help them select an application.
Process Improvement and Results
Ally volunteers, Kevin Riddle, Jovan Talbert, Sandra Byrd, and Bernard Neely, assisted Darryl Bego of YDI with the process improvement.
In reviewing YDI’s processes, Ally skilled volunteers discovered the nonprofit was underutilizing their Sharepoint/Teams applications. Ally volunteers guided the YDI team through an implementation process to help streamline how they were sharing curriculum with teachers. Through this process, they discovered YDI could expand their services beyond the four-county region they currently serve by using the Teams online-platform remotely. As a result of this six month long partnership with YDI, Ally went above and beyond and donated 24 laptops to YDI!
With the implementation of Sharepoint and Teams, YDI anticipates saving 312 hours on administrative and 520 hours on operations tasks annually resulting in a savings of $10,400 in teachers’ salaries throughout the year. YDI will reassign this salary savings to hire more summer teachers. As a result of this project, YDI anticipates expanding their reach over the next few years, and furthering their mission of helping disadvantaged youth in our communities.
Ally Volunteer and YDI Share their Thoughts
After the project wrapped up, we spoke to Kevin Riddle, the Senior Director of Tech Delivery Management of Ally. He shared, “Providing support and tech solutioning to YDI was a rewarding experience for our Ally Black and Brown in Technology volunteer group. It was our honor to serve alongside YDI in the impactful work they do for Charlotte youth, which aligns with out mission to ‘do it right’ for the communities where we live and work.”
Darryl Bego, President and CEO of YDI, was elated with the way the process improvement turned out, and shared his joy and the impact the Ally team made on his nonprofit.
“Working with the Ally IT Team has been both a joy and a blessing! A joy because the Ally IT Team is a group of consummate professionals who are also caring people and creative problem solvers. A blessing because they met with YDI each week for six months and did the following:
- Listened intently to our technological issues
- Strategically suggested IT solutions to address our challenges
- Skillfully guided us through an implementation process that has streamlined our administrative and operational takes, and strengthened our internal communications, saving us time, money, and resources!
YDI can now do the following:
- More efficiently store and share our training lessons online.
- Better train and engage remote staff members
- Easily archive and access pertinent reference materials
- Seamlessly scale our critical career planning and life job skills development services with fidelity to disadvantaged youth and families throughout Charlotte, adjoining counties, and anywhere in the state or beyond!
Thank you, Ally Team! Your dedicated service and efforts on our behalf are greatly appreciated.”
Are you interested in using your skills to provide process improvement for a nonprofit in Charlotte, Atlanta, or Raleigh? Find out how you can volunteer here.
