In Charlotte, N.C., businesses, civic groups and individual volunteers have been eager to contribute, but plugging the resources into the needs was often difficult. That was one of the first challenges Deborah Antshel faced in 1997 when she became partnerships director of North Carolinas largest school system, Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools (CMS). Her solution was a database that simplifies the search for business and community partners for the districts schools. It is called the School Partnerships Resource Locator.
Before creating the Resource Locator, Antshel said finding partners was expensive and time consuming. "When we were looking for business partners for a school, a staff member would drive the neighborhood around the school, write down the names of businesses, then come back to the office and look them up in the phone book," Antshel said. "It was an ineffective, inefficient system."
Antshel estimated that it cost an average of $155 plus mileage for every corporate donor CMS found. CMS also had no formal process for partnering with businesses and organizations that already had expressed an interest in collaborating with a school, nor did it have an effective system for matching schools needs with potential resources to fill those needs. Schools needs often went unmet, and potential partners were frustrated by the time it took to match them with a school.
Antshel realized that CMS needed a quick, efficient, user-friendly system for matching needs and resources. With the help of Mecklenburg Countys geographic information system, database software and a volunteer tracking system, the district has hit upon a unique solution costing tens of thousands of dollars less than a prepackaged system.
Matchmaking
After more than a year of preparation and at a cost of just $16,000 -- covered by a donation from Charlotte-based Bank of America Corp. -- the district implemented the School Partnerships Resource Locator. With just a few computer clicks, a school can be matched with all the businesses and other resources in the community that can fill the schools needs. Or, a business or club with labor or materials to offer can be paired instantly with a school that needs help.
For example, Coulwood Middle School in Charlotte desperately needed landscaping work done on its campus, and the schools wish was listed in the districts "catalog of needs." Next, the Resource Locator identified a group of 30 interested volunteers from a Charlotte company and a Home Depot store willing to donate the plants, pine straw, shovels and other materials needed to do the job.
"There was no cold calling," said Antshel. "We were matchmakers, not dealmakers."
Useful Tool
The Resource Locator was developed using MapObjects, a Visual Basic add-on with GIS capabilities developed by ESRI. The application has a Windows-like screen appearance. The layout includes a map display, a toolbar to pan and zoom, a text box for school identification and two tabs that hold school reports and resource search functions.
The Resource Locator is a point-and-click application. The user selects a school by typing the schools name in the text box or by clicking on the school on the map display.
Although using the Resource Locator is simple, creating the application was a long and sometimes tedious process that took more than 300 hours, said Matthew Crisp, a GIS systems analyst of Mecklenburg County.
The biggest challenge was data collection, Crisp said. The school system provided the school locations. Charlottes Engineering Department identified street locations. The Park and Recreation Department identified parks. The countys Public Service Department supplied information on hospitals. The Charlotte-Mecklenburg Planning Commission established neighborhood boundaries. The County Board of Elections supplied state and local political districts. The Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department identified public housing projects and other key information. Each school determined its specific needs for volunteers, expertise or materials and supplies.
Plotting businesses was the most time-consuming task, Crisp said. Using records from the County Tax Office, planners identified more than 6,000 businesses in Mecklenburg County. The police department identified adult-oriented businesses that would be inappropriate as school partners, and those businesses were eliminated.
For every CMS school, the Resource Locator now can identify surrounding businesses by category; the city, county and state political districts in which the school is located; office holders who represent the school; and police and fire stations, libraries, places of worship, parks, public housing, hospitals and health department clinics serving the surrounding area.
"The Resource Locator offers us a gold mine of potential partnerships and a very focused catalog of each schools needs," said Antshel. "Now, our energy can be focused on actually meeting those needs, rather than searching blindly for new partners or going back to the same supporters again and again."
Volunteer Tracking
Since the Resource Locator went online last year, corporate partnerships with CMS have jumped more than 38 percent. But with 650 corporate sponsors and more than 30,000 volunteers logging more than 600,000 hours a year in Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools, keeping track of whos in the schools, what needs to be done and whos doing it becomes a new challenge. Again, CMS looked to technology to create and implement a trial volunteer tracking system in 15 of its 139 schools.
At each participating school, a computer terminal networked to the CMS partnerships department is set up in the school office, and all of the information from the schools catalog of needs is stored in a database. When a volunteer shows up at the school, he or she logs in to the computer with a personal password, which allows the volunteer to access the system at his or her predetermined volunteer level. Once the volunteer accesses the system, a list of needs matching his or her expressed interest pops up on the screen. When the volunteer makes his or her choice, the database is automatically updated, eliminating redundancy. The system tracks each volunteers time in the schools, records which needs are being met and even prints out the name tags volunteers must wear while in the school.
CMS ultimately plans to expand the volunteer tracking system to all CMS schools, but, like anything, the expansion will take money. "The good news," Antshel said, "is that were in a better position than ever to find the partners to get it done."
