In just over a year as an Apparo volunteer, Eden Estabrook has already supported 80 nonprofits in improving the way they work with technology.
Eden shares her Apparo volunteer story with us. “I heard of Apparo when I was volunteering as a writer for SHARE Charlotte. I loved the idea that, like with SHARE, I could work with one nonprofit to help many nonprofits. My personality likes variety. I was also very interested in using my workplace skills as a volunteer. I had never used my project management skills or my digital marketing knowledge as a volunteer before. I’m not a consultant and I don’t have deep technology skills, but I had the right skills for these roles.”
Eden joined Apparo as a volunteer Change Agent in 2021, facilitating a Community Impact Project for Carolina Breast Friends. She found the experience very rewarding, “I do a lot of project management at work, so it’s second nature to me. Using these skills to help a nonprofit meant a lot to me and it was so much less time consuming than volunteering as a writer. As I advance in my career, finding ways that work with my schedule gets harder.”
She then moved on to support Freedom Communities, serving again as a Change Agent. “This was a much smaller team and we really built connections. We reach out to each other still and support each other professionally.”
For her next Apparo volunteer initiative, Eden took on education, serving as a digital marketing trainer in our free Bytes + Insights webinar series. She shares, “I love what I do for a living. It was fun to volunteer using this knowledge and so important to help nonprofits understand the fundamentals of this digital age.”
What on the horizon for Eden as an Apparo volunteer? More training! She will be teaching her digital marketing curriculum to Apparo’s second Unite Charlotte cohort.
In closing, Eden shares, “Volunteering with Apparo is a good opportunity to take the skills you use on an everyday basis to help a nonprofit without a big time commitment. It’s also a way to meet great people and build your network of people with different skills. Sarah [Gregory, Apparo’s volunteer manager] is fantastic at her job and makes it very easy to volunteer.”
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