One of the many services the Regina-based Al Ritchie Community Association (new window) provides is donating free food and clothing to community members in need. Over the past five years, the program has grown from giving out hundreds of pounds of food and clothing to donating over 100,000 lbs of each in the last year. However, many of the systems — to keep track of the inventory, who was getting what — hadn’t changed.

“We would have to compile that all by hand,” says Executive Director Denis Simard. “[It] was a super onerous program and system for us to do by paper and literally took some of our staff members taking them home and we would do them for hours, just tabulating on our couches in our free time.”

The Al Ritchie Community Association had hired Eric for a work placement through our Empower3D employment program for youth with disabilities. Eric, who has cerebral palsy, graduated from university with a bachelor’s degree in software systems engineering in 2024. However, he had missed out on many of the typical networking and co-op opportunities due to the COVID pandemic, leaving him without the experience and connections he needed to find employment in his field.

Eric’s task was to create a more streamlined, automated process for food and clothing donations. A new kind of project for him, Eric began researching how he could do it, including reaching out to his previous professors, as well as contacts in the association and other non-profits to learn all he could.

“He knew right from the get-go that this was going to be a big project,” Denis explains. “So that was really the first month was just Eric kind of going through that process, figuring things out. And then spending time with us, learning our process.”

Another challenge was making sure that the system was easy enough to use by anyone — the program is largely run by volunteers, who range in age from 20 to 90, and have varying levels of skill using computers.

Eric eventually devised a system where volunteers could input all of the information — the weight of the food and clothes going out, the postal code of the recipient — into a program on a tablet, and then everything is inputted and tabulated automatically on a spreadsheet.

“Eric was able to, in the short time that he was with us, basically automate that whole side of the building, centralized all of that information, create a static excel sheet that now I have all that information auto tabulating on,” Denis says. “It basically has streamlined tens — if not hundreds — of hours of work for us on an annual basis.”

Through the project, Eric has gained a lot of self-confidence.

“[Eric has] a pep in his step, like he was so proud of what he did. He translated something that he wasn’t sure about, that he had kind of an idea about [into a solution],” Denis shares. “He learned a lot and his self-confidence is different. He’s actually accomplished something — he knows that he’s helped an organization. And we’re proud to be a reference for him, speaking to what he was able to achieve for us.”

Denis says he “absolutely” recommends Empower3D, which offers wage subsidies for employers.

“We wouldn’t have been able to do it without it, basically, is what it comes down to. We’re a really small non-profit, we have limited resources,” he explains. “Eric was able to show up and customize something for us, which — had we done that sort of real world purchasing an outside company would have cost us through the roof — versus having this specialized individual show up with his knowledge, learn through the process, and provide us a solution that is still holding up months and months later.”