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Saving Hours of Work, Freeing Resources to Help More People with Catholic Charities, Diocese of Joliet Turns
Catholic Charities, Diocese of Joliet provides home-delivered and congregate meals to older adults in Kankakee County, Illinois, along with exercise classes, bingo, sound baths, and other recreational programs across the region. Brandon Barrows leads the nutrition programs and uses ServTracker by CaseWorthy for nutrition operations, reporting, and client data, while the Community-Based Programs team uses the recreation module to track classes and activities.
What you’ll hear about:
- How Catholic Charities, Diocese of Joliet used ServTracker to cut 17 hours of manual state database logging for meal delivery clients not yet in the system
- How setting up an automated import between ServTracker and the state database eliminated countless additional hours of duplicate manual data entry
- How consolidating case notes, PDFs, and scattered records into one system eliminated information silos across home-delivered and congregate meal programs
- How ServTracker Touch streamlined congregate meal tracking, recreation activities, and volunteer tracking at a high-need site, cutting paper pickups and site visits for physical paperwork
- How having one all-encompassing system for meal delivery routing, congregate programs, and recreation has transformed day-to-day program operations
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT
My name is Brandon Barrows. I work with Catholic Charities, Diocese of Joliet. It’s a social work agency, and we provide home-delivered meals and congregate meals to Kankakee County in Illinois.
We spent a lot of time manually logging units into our state database so that would be the things that we were—the people that we now have in ServTracker, but certain clients we didn’t have, and we had to manually log things. So for the one subset of clients that weren’t in ServTracker yet, we were spending, before, 17 hours manually logging those. And then the stuff that we were doing with ServTracker, we still had to do some manual stuff before imports were set up, and we were spending countless hours just manually logging data from—that we already had in one system, but then manually logging it in the state system. So we did get an import set up between our state database and ServTracker, and that has saved countless hours.
So before this, a lot of the information was in a case note, in in a PDF of something, in just different places, and now all that data can be in one place, and that is, has been, and will be, I think, our greatest asset is to not have silos of information, but to have it all in one place.
I no longer need to drive out to my sites and visit with them, which I still do go out and see them, but it’s not to pick up physical paperwork anymore, which then I scan to my email and save as a PDF. You know, there’s a lot less work. There’s a lot less driving. One of our traditional congregate sites does currently utilize ServTracker Touch, and that has been working wonderfully since we got it set up at that site. They use it for congregate meal tracking, some recreation activities, and then also the volunteer tracking out at that site for the volunteers who help at that congregate site. So that’s been very helpful as well. This specific congregate site is actually at our most impoverished city within our region of Illinois, but maybe even possibly in the state of Illinois. That’s why we definitely always wanna keep a congregate site there, and I was very heavily invested in getting the system of ServTracker Touch set up there because that has been a godsend to my site coordinator and her kitchen assistant and volunteers to be able to have the data all there in one place and easily entered through ServTracker Touch. So that has been a wonderful addition out there at that site.
It really has become an all-encompassing place to store our data, to do our meal delivery, routing for home-delivered meals, for congregate sites, for our recreation, programs and things. So it has been an invaluable piece of technology that really has revolutionized how I operate my program, and I hope it has for the community-based programs as well.
Check out the Catholic Charities, Diocese of Joliet Case Study
For the complete story of Catholic Charities, Diocese of Joliet, including program details and outcomes, read the full case study.
