Countdown to MLK Day of Service

As we count down to Martin Luther King Jr. Day of Service on Monday, January 19th, we'll be featuring a few non-profit organizations that have found some creative ways to use Google Docs. These organizations are all dedicated to serving their communities and championing their causes, and like most non-profits, require the support of volunteers to keep their operations running. We hope that this series of posts will encourage you to dedicate next Monday's holiday to community service, and that you will find some worthy causes to support year-round, if you haven't already.

We've asked the featured organizations to share some of their Google Docs as templates so that others can use them as well. Look for a collection of these templates in a future post.

To kick things off, we thought we'd start with an organization close to home here in Silicon Valley. West Valley Community Services is based in Cupertino, California, and has been providing food, shelter and family-resources support to low-income families in the West Valley region of Santa Clara county for the last 35 years. They have more than 200 weekly volunteers and 24 staff members who have been using Docs since last February.

In addition to using Docs to manage contact lists and policy documents, Vicki Yang, Director of Operations told us, "We basically use Google Docs for anything that requires more than one person to look at or work on," which can include everything from donation tracking in a spreadsheet, to planning staff potlucks. The organization also uses forms linked from their website to manage external sign-ups for their weekly parent workshops and other community events.

To learn more about West Valley Community Services, or to find out how you can volunteer or support them, visit www.wvcommunityservices.org.

If your non-profit organization uses Google Docs and you'd like to share your story with us, please fill out this form. We look forward to hearing from you!

Posted by: Vivian Leung, Product Marketing Manager