Our Perficient colleagues share how they live and breathe our core values. Here, Allison Fries, Chief Strategist, Go To Market for Cloud Strategy, shares how her teammates stepped up in a big way to help a local nonprofit, We Don’t Waste, fight hunger. Allison is also on the board of directors for We Don’t Waste.
I take great pride in the work my Perficient colleagues and I do, not only for our clients but also for our local community. We recently had the opportunity to tackle a pro-bono project for We Don’t Waste, a Denver-based nonprofit for which I am on the board, and I’m extremely proud and grateful for the team that helped pull it together.
Addressing the Needs at We Don’t Waste
Today, 40 percent all food produced is thrown away. We Don’t Waste collects unused food from venues, caterers, restaurants, and other outlets and redistributes quality items to underserved populations. For years, the organization survived on two trucks. That meant they had to pick up food that might spoil and deliver it to community organizations on the same day.
We Don’t Waste was able to secure a warehouse this year, and that enabled the organization to provide food to so many more individuals and smaller organizations, which was the organization’s heart and soul in the early stages. As they grew, however, they needed to stick primarily with the larger feeding houses and suppliers.
Eliminating the Growth Obstacles
We have a tremendous amount of supply chain expertise within our Management Consulting group. A small team from that practice took a lot of their own personal time to support We Don’t Waste with these skills.
We laid out We Don’t Waste’s warehouse to make it as efficient as possible and we recommended to them the technology we thought would be most appropriate for supporting the warehouse and logistics around it. We showed them how to best utilize the technology, so it could also help with efficiency, and volunteered hours to get their warehouse set up.
Continuing Our Work
We’re in the process now of helping put together a volunteer plan for the We Don’t Waste team, so that they know how to best utilize volunteers when they have them available. In the past, they couldn’t really use volunteers, so they had to keep community outreach to their minimal staff. This is really going to provide We Don’t Waste with the opportunity to grow dramatically in scale.
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