What do a hamburger, an assault in Red Deer, and a piece of custom-built database software, have in common? They’re all linked by one St. Albert volunteer.
Dale Fetterly is a retired software designer who volunteers with the local RCMP and the St. Albert Neighbourhood Watch group, among others. He has made it easier for advocates to help victims of crime while also figuring out how to pay for the dozens of block parties Neighbourhood Watch supports each year.
And it was as simple as writing a piece of software for St. Albert’s Victim Services Unit that has garnered enough interest he’s now selling it to other VSUs in the province.
“This software appears to be quite popular, and because I did it as a volunteer all the money I get from these will go to Neighbourhood Watch,” he explained.
The main crime-prevention initiative of the local neighbourhood watch group is to promote block parties, and the group provides the hamburgers and hot dogs for the parties as long as organizers hand out literature along with the invitations.
It was a challenge when there were a couple dozen parties in a given year, and more so now that the figure has grown to include more than 100 block parties annually.
“Getting money for it has been a challenge since Day 1,” Fetterly said. “We’ve tried other projects to raise money, and this one looks like it’s accidentally going to be the one that works. That wasn’t the intention in the beginning.”
He has already sold the software to VSU in Fort Saskatchewan, Leduc and Red Deer, and has heard interest from other units around the province. At $500 per computer per year, that’s a lot of ground beef.
But equally significant is the benefit this software has for the staff and volunteers who help victims of crime in the province. VSUs are funded in part by the provincial Solicitor General’s office, which requires quarterly reporting on statistics: how many clients, how many volunteers, how many hours spent with each client, source of referral, etc.
In the past these records have all been kept on paper, meaning reams and reams of files, but the software allows it all to take place instantly, so that over the year volunteers and staff put the information into the database, and when reporting time comes around it’s as simple as clicking a button.
“It generates these statistics, then it generates the charts for them,” Fetterly said. “Now they can just click, and they’re done in seconds.”
St. Albert’s Victim Services Unit has been using the software for a year, and director Edith Podruzny said it has allowed her organization to do away with the old filing system altogether.
“It was physically time-consuming for us, and just a nuisance,” she said. “We’re now paperless; we went paperless in January 2015 and so we’re excited about that because it frees up a lot of space for us, too, in our office.”
And in an organization that requires maximizing the benefit of a limited number of available volunteer hours, spending less time searching through paper files and digging out notes lets them focus on more important things.
“It’s a huge time saver for all of us,” Podruzny said. “We’re putting the work now more into our clients than we are into the paper side of things.”
While only a handful of other VSUs have signed on to the software yet, when she tells others about the paperless office their ears perk up immediately.
“It’s really taken off; we’ve had a lot of interest right across the province, really,” she said. “I believe it’s just going to grow.”
