Meet Jill, one of CCT's long-time volunteers, who helps clients, volunteers and the operations of delivering both high quality recommendations and ensuring an excellent volunteer experience.
CCT role: Previous liaison to Client Development
Volunteer since: 1992
MBA: Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth
First CCT project: Jill worked on her first CCT team in 1992, evaluating a pilot study for the Massachusetts Audubon Society. The team worked to focus the programming involved in bringing inner-city kids to the farm and the farm bounty to the inner- city. Eventually, Mass Audubon spun off The Food Project as a separate 501(c)(3), and it remains successful to this day.
Describe your CCT experience:
For several years Jill was a team member volunteer, and for the last dozen years she has been an instrumental Board member. She helped CCT evolve from an organization that consulted with three or four clients/year, with small teams of volunteers to the current organization that helps 10-12 Boston-area nonprofits with large teams, formalized support, resources, structure and clear expectations.
In her current role as Client Development liaison to the Board, Jill Tsakiris works on recruiting clients with worthy projects and matching them with volunteers’ experiences and expertise. She adds, “CCT is adamant about delivering high quality recommendations and ensuring an excellent volunteer experience. Our biggest constraint is in finding experienced Project Managers to staff the many worthy project requests that CCT receives each year. It takes a special person to manage a successful project team.”
Jill’s passion for CCT stems from her ability to share her most valuable asset - her education at MIT and Tuck - with socially-conscious nonprofits whose mission she believes in. Year after year, CCT offered tremendous flexibility so Jill could make meaningful contributions at different stages of her life. Before she had children, she worked on client teams that mostly met in the evenings. As one of the few women in high tech, Jill appreciated that CCT offered a way to meet other highly educated professional women and a new cadre of impressive CCT colleagues. After her children were born, Jill went on the CCT Board for a number of terms and undertook projects where she could make contributions on her own time without as much structure.
For many years, Jill was the Volunteer Liaison on the Board. She became an expert on what makes an engaging volunteer experience in order to keep volunteers returning. Some of the things she helped implement include: having a clear project start and finish date, a winter-spring intensive-but-predictable timeline, improved logistics, an online application, project preference matching, using productivity tools, and capturing volunteer feedback.