Covid-19 has affected many people’s lives and has prevented them from accomplishing their desired tasks. Highschoolers, especially those in 11th and 12th grade, have been greatly affected by this treacherous pandemic, since it has limited them towards completing their mandatory volunteer hours that are to be done each year. Volunteer organizations and nonprofits have also been greatly affected by this pandemic in similar manner. Recognizing this as an opportunity, a Tompkins Highschool student, LakshyaGupta, created an online volunteering system to help both volunteers and volunteer organizations with their day to day activities, when faced with this limitation while volunteering at a senior living facility.
Recently Lakshya Gupta, a junior at Tompkins high school created a web-basedproduct known as Volassis.The name originated from the combination of words“Volunteer” and “Assist”. Volassis is a fully-online system that automates the completeworkflow of volunteering, right from finding the opportunities to getting the hoursapproved from the organizations with just a few clicks.
The concept started simple, when Lakshya realized that most of the volunteer tracking system at the Senior Living facility in Cinco Ranch, where he has been volunteering for over a year, was manual. He started creating a bar-code based volunteer check-in system, the kind which he had seen in schools for marking the attendance, and planned to have few reports.n March 2020, when Covid-19 struck he had to change directions to make it fully online so anyone can access it from their homes. When asked why Lakshya did this, he said, “I realized both volunteers and organizations have been greatly affected by the pandemic, and started thinking about ways I could assist with their work so they could operate at the same level as they could before the pandemic. He also mentions that “he has a knack to recognize limitations in existing systems, and feels almost irresistible drive to fix and improve them. With my passion in Computer Science and a good hold on several software technologies, I wanted to create an enhanced and easy-to-use volunteering system that not only made finding opportunities easier but also provided a one-stop platform for all volunteer needs.”
The project started ideation during his Sophomore year when he was volunteering with an organization for senior care called “Sunrise Senior Living”, and all their records were manual. He started to automate the attendance system, and in a matter of a few months many new features required for full online volunteering were added during theCOVID-19 times. Volassis is currently catering to 4 organizations and many more volunteers. Along with the website, Lakshya is in the process of making a mobile application, which will be released around the spring 2020. The system was developed out of a need to improve the existing archaic email based manual systems, which make this process very cumbersome and time-consuming.
With the pandemic still carrying on, Lakshya plans on continuing his development on this system so that it can continue serving the community during times of need.
More information can be found at www.volassis.com
