Hollie Bracewell
Bright Food Co-op is a community-run food shop in Bright, Victoria. It's grown quickly, and with that came more pressure on a small group of regulars carrying most of the load. New members weren't sure how to get involved. The process was informal, undocumented, and held together by institutional memory.
I was brought in through an Alpine Shire Council grant to improve volunteer onboarding and retention. The grant brief outlined a set of deliverables: an onboarding framework, a volunteer management system and a reusable blueprint for other community groups. How to get there was entirely up to me.
This is a project I genuinely cared about. The co-op is an organisation I support, and knowing my work would directly help it run better made it easy to go deep. It was a small grant and I probably over-delivered, but that's what happens when you care.
The problem
The co-op didn't have a broken volunteer program. It had a working one that wasn't legible to newcomers, coordinators, or anyone trying to bring more people in.
I talked to volunteer leads across different shifts, then ran a short pulse survey with separate pathways for current volunteers, lapsed volunteers, and interested members. Three barriers kept coming up: people felt short on time, weren't sure what volunteering involved, and didn't want to commit to something ongoing.
Nearly all of the members who hadn't yet volunteered said they'd prefer to help ad-hoc rather than commit to a regular shift. The interest was already there, what was missing was a clear, low-pressure way in.
What I designed
The program covers the full volunteer journey. From how people first hear about volunteering through to what keeps them coming back. Across that, I designed the volunteer role descriptions, volunteer web page redesign, in-store recruitment materials, the complete set of automated emails (confirmation, reminder, post-shift thank you), a personal follow-up guide for shift leads, printed shift task cards, a social content strategy with example posts, and a lightweight measurement approach. All of it built on a low-overhead tool stack the co-op already used.
This project gave me the space to focus entirely on the system — the content, the structure, the communications, the experience across every touchpoint. That kind of end-to-end thinking is something I bring to most projects, but here it was the whole job.
The blueprint
As part of the grant scope, I packaged the whole model into a reusable Community Volunteer Program Blueprint. A freely shareable guide for any community organisation to adapt. It covers the full volunteer journey and includes all the templates and resources. Written for organisations with limited time and no dedicated design support.
What I took from it
The program is currently moving into implementation, and I'll update this case study with observations as things roll out.
This project gave me a lot of confidence in owning a problem end-to-end — the strategy, the content, the communications, the system as a whole. For a small organisation running lean, that breadth is exactly what's needed. And honestly, getting to think at that level reminded me how much I enjoy it.
