Program on the Environment

Pollution is generated through residents throwing away perfectly reusable materials that will never again find a home. Seattle ReCreative, a nonprofit organization dedicated to reusing creative materials, tackles the issue of discarded materials never being reused. Instead of throwing reusable materials away, they can be brought to Seattle ReCreative for other community members to use. The aim of this study is to enhance volunteer organization and management and address their current weaknesses for a faster donation flow at both Seattle ReCreative locations. I performed interviews with the staff and volunteers to understand what was needed most and through those interviews, I found out that they need efficient documentation to be set in place. Proper documentation was missing and through my work, they now have a task documentation system. I then used the feedback from the interviews to create two binders that contain every volunteer task that the volunteers can refer to when coming into their work site. I also used observational skills to see how each task is performed to create the best representation in my binder. After implementing a stronger way to manage and document volunteer tasks, Seattle ReCreative will be able to collect more donations and redirect reusable materials into their store rather than them being left out in our environment. The results of this internship will allow the Seattle community to donate their reusable materials for creative use while decreasing pollution at the same time.