Jenny Pollack

Researcher, January-May 2020

Role responsibilities
 Analyzed 1,000 homeless shelter websites (the top 20 most searched shelters in all 50
states) and created a 21-page document with ideas for the Lawrence Community
Shelter to consider implementing.
 During the COVID-19 pandemic, researched media coverage of other homeless shelters
throughout the country to find solutions to problems these shelters were incorporating
for ideas the Lawrence Community Shelter might consider.
 Created a 12-month calendar of approximately 90 different National Awareness Days
(e.g. Random Acts of Kindness Day) that can be incorporated into posts on the Lawrence
Community Shelter social media web sites.

MAJOR ACCOMPLISHMENT:

Situation: The COVID-19 pandemic has made it impossible for volunteers to do in-person work.

Task: With in-person volunteer work not possible the question became, how does the Lawrence
Community Shelter find a role for volunteers?

Action: When I first started, my initial assignment was to create documents for the Lawrence
Community Shelter Facebook page that tied in to various national awareness days relevant to the
shelter. This led to a lot of false starts due to me using software that was incompatible to the
shelter’s needs, not realizing social media requirements of the shelter, etc. A big problem was
that the pandemic had just hit, and the director of volunteers did not have the time to provide
preliminary guidelines for me to follow. Toward the end of my time working remotely for the
shelter, the director of volunteers asked me for feedback on how to improve volunteer work like
I was doing for the shelter. By this time, the director of volunteers had much more time to
interact back and forth with me, and together we created a new program for future remote
volunteers in which the emphasis was placed on doing research for the shelter’s social media
posts rather than the actual creation of the posts which a full-time shelter employee will do
incorporating the research provided.
Response: Based upon my feedback, we created the guidelines that were not available to me
when I first started for future remote volunteers to utilize and eliminate the false starts I
experienced. The result was the volunteers experienced far less frustration moving forward.