About
Starting Semester: Fall 2025Assigned: No
Location: Sugar Hill
Neighborhood Meals on Wheels
Client Profile
Neighborhood Meals on Wheels is a non-profit member organization of Meals on Wheels America and serves Gwinnett County. Each weekday, volunteer teams prepare fresh meals at their commercial kitchen in Sugar Hill, and then deliver them through their network of volunteer drivers to senior and disabled adults living in Norcross, Peachtree Corners, Duluth, Suwanee, Buford, Sugar Hill, and Lawrenceville, which is just a portion of the total county. In 2024, NMOW delivered 35,373 meals to approximately 220 senior adults throughout Gwinnett County with projections to grow another 55% in 2025. They are currently in a 1500 Sq ft kitchen/warehouse, but will be moving to an approximately 6,000 sq ft kitchen/warehouse this fall. There are 4 employees: an Executive Director, Kitchen Manager, Volunteer Scheduler, and Grant Writer. NMOW fills approximately 275 volunteer opportunities each month to serve the community.Project Description
Gwinnett’s senior population is projected to triple by 2050 and it is imperative that NMOW grow aggressively to be ready for this surge as baby boomers strive to age in place. We need help scaling our organization for future growth to meet Gwinnett’s rising need in this area. We are well-funded and are looking to invest in infrastructure for the future. We are looking for help in the following areas:• Volunteer scheduling/management
• KPI/metric capture and benchmarking
• Business Process Optimization and Improvement and simulation
• Data analysis
We currently use a large (relative to our client base) number of volunteers to prepare and distribute food to our clients. Since they are volunteers, we need to provide a highly flexible volunteer scheduling approach in terms of quantity and frequency of shifts. It is also important that we are flexible and enable volunteers to make changes to their volunteer schedule when conflicts arise. In addition, we currently use a hub and spoke distribution system that covers a small portion of the county that we will need to dramatically expand to ultimately cover the approximately 400 square mile area of Gwinnett county. Finally, our current volunteer delivery processes, as well as the distribution mechanism and training of those processes, will need to be enhanced.
We are seeking a team to transform and optimize these processes for organizing, scheduling, and training our volunteer base. That would include collecting metrics for our existing processes, benchmarking against best practices, enhancing and documenting an optimized set of processes. Most importantly, we seek recommendations to build or purchase a cost-effective volunteer management program that meets our flexibility and other requirements. We also seek business process improvement regarding our training and distribution of our volunteer delivery processes.