City Harvest
‘Harvest Hub’ portal
Optimizing food surplus distribution in New York’s five boroughs
City Harvest works with over 1,700 food businesses to redirect surplus food to more than 600 community organizations across NYC. They use a portal, ‘Harvest Hub,’ to interface with those food agencies.
The previous agency portal, a tangled web of legacy systems, required partners to call or text City Harvest staff to manage allocations. This placed additional burden on overtaxed staff whose core responsibilities were increasing operational effectiveness.
The redesigned Harvest Hub Portal places food management directly in partners’ hands: viewing deliveries, managing substitutions, tracking drivers, logging pounds, and accessing training and grant information.
Outcome
The product successfully reduced coordination overhead for City Harvest staff and gave agency partners, who know their communities best, direct control over their operations.
new food portal
Brooklyn food pantry inside a public school
Calendar as operations locus
The original calendar could only flag that a delivery was scheduled for a day, not the number, time, type, or source of origin. In the new tool time becomes the primary organizing principle, featuring an exhaustive display of inbound/outbound shown, as well as trainings and grant/funding deadlines.
View previous calendar
new calendar
calendar demo (2:00)
reminders and notifications point to most urgent needs
communication typically going to txt now gets entered in the portal
Mobilizing staff
The prior tool did not work on mobile devices, forcing all agencies to track and record inventory from a desktop. For many this meant recording inbound/outbound figures by hand for later entry. Lack of product mobility also encouraged texts and phone calls to HQ support staff, as the tool was not available when it was most useful.
mobile allocation management walkthrough (1:26)
“One team member said they ‘breathed a sigh of relief’ when they saw the whole thing.”
how substitutions were tracked pre-redesign
substitution management today
Team
City Harvest
Kyle Clayton, Associate Director, Business Intelligence
Tony Ortiz, Senior Manager, Program Operations
Brownen Stine, VP of IT
Pedro Urbaez, Associate Director, Program Operations
Elizabeth Vispo, Senior Coordinator, Program Operations
Elizabeth Voigt, Food Access and Network Capacity Manager
Taylor Watson, Digital Marketing Manager
Happy Cog
Ben Carr, Tech Lead
Diana Cherian, Senior Project Manager
Michael Johnson (MJ), Head of Design
Kate Ramsey, Design Lead Product
City Harvest
‘Harvest Hub’ portal
Optimizing food surplus distribution in New York’s five boroughs
City Harvest works with over 1,700 food businesses to redirect surplus food to more than 600 community organizations across NYC. They use a portal, ‘Harvest Hub,’ to interface with those food agencies.
The previous agency portal, a tangled web of legacy systems, required partners to call or text City Harvest staff to manage allocations. This placed additional burden on overtaxed staff whose core responsibilities were increasing operational effectiveness.
The redesigned Harvest Hub Portal places food management directly in partners’ hands: viewing deliveries, managing substitutions, tracking drivers, logging pounds, and accessing training and grant information.
Outcome
The product successfully reduced coordination overhead for City Harvest staff and gave agency partners, who know their communities best, direct control over their operations.
new food portal
Brooklyn food pantry inside a public school
Calendar as operations locus
The original calendar could only flag that a delivery was scheduled for a day, not the number, time, type, or source of origin. In the new tool time becomes the primary organizing principle, featuring an exhaustive display of inbound/outbound shown, as well as trainings and grant/funding deadlines.
View previous calendarnew calendar
calendar demo (2:00)
reminders and notifications point to most urgent needs
communication typically going to txt now gets entered in the portal
Mobilizing staff
The prior tool did not work on mobile devices, forcing all agencies to track and record inventory from a desktop. For many this meant recording inbound/outbound figures by hand for later entry. Lack of product mobility also encouraged texts and phone calls to HQ support staff, as the tool was not available when it was most useful.
mobile allocation management walkthrough (1:26)
“One team member said they ‘breathed a sigh of relief’ when they saw the whole thing.”
how substitutions were tracked pre-redesign
substitution management today
Team
City Harvest
Kyle Clayton, Associate Director, Business Intelligence
Tony Ortiz, Senior Manager, Program Operations
Brownen Stine, VP of IT
Pedro Urbaez, Associate Director, Program Operations
Elizabeth Vispo, Senior Coordinator, Program Operations
Elizabeth Voigt, Food Access and Network Capacity Manager
Taylor Watson, Digital Marketing Manager
Happy Cog
Ben Carr, Tech Lead
Diana Cherian, Senior Project Manager
Michael Johnson (MJ), Head of Design
Kate Ramsey, Design Lead Product
City Harvest
‘Harvest Hub’ portal
Optimizing food surplus distribution in New York’s five boroughs
City Harvest works with over 1,700 food businesses to redirect surplus food to more than 600 community organizations across NYC. They use a portal, ‘Harvest Hub,’ to interface with those food agencies.
The previous agency portal, a tangled web of legacy systems, required partners to call or text City Harvest staff to manage allocations. This placed additional burden on overtaxed staff whose core responsibilities were increasing operational effectiveness.
The redesigned Harvest Hub Portal places food management directly in partners’ hands: viewing deliveries, managing substitutions, tracking drivers, logging pounds, and accessing training and grant information.
Outcome
The product successfully reduced coordination overhead for City Harvest staff and gave agency partners, who know their communities best, direct control over their operations.
new food portal
Brooklyn food pantry inside a public school
Calendar as operations locus
The original calendar could only flag that a delivery was scheduled for a day, not the number, time, type, or source of origin. In the new tool time becomes the primary organizing principle, featuring an exhaustive display of inbound/outbound shown, as well as trainings and grant/funding deadlines.
View previous calendarnew calendar
calendar demo (2:00)
reminders and notifications point to most urgent needs
communication typically going to txt now gets entered in the portal
Mobilizing staff
The prior tool did not work on mobile devices, forcing all agencies to track and record inventory from a desktop. For many this meant recording inbound/outbound figures by hand for later entry. Lack of product mobility also encouraged texts and phone calls to HQ support staff, as the tool was not available when it was most useful.
mobile allocation management walkthrough (1:26)
“One team member said they ‘breathed a sigh of relief’ when they saw the whole thing.”
how substitutions were tracked pre-redesign
substitution management today
Team
City Harvest
Kyle Clayton, Associate Director, Business Intelligence
Tony Ortiz, Senior Manager, Program Operations
Brownen Stine, VP of IT
Pedro Urbaez, Associate Director, Program Operations
Elizabeth Vispo, Senior Coordinator, Program Operations
Elizabeth Voigt, Food Access and Network Capacity Manager
Taylor Watson, Digital Marketing Manager
Happy Cog
Ben Carr, Tech Lead
Diana Cherian, Senior Project Manager
Michael Johnson (MJ), Head of Design
Kate Ramsey, Design Lead Product