Congratulations to BriarPatch Food Co-op in Grass Valley, Calif., which has been named a winner in the National Grocery Association’s (NGA) Creative Choice Awards for Community Engagement for its PatchWorks Community Volunteer Program. The award was for marketing in the subcategory of Community Engagement. The Creative Choice Awards recognize excellence in grocers’ marketing and merchandising programs. NGA received a total of nearly 400 award submissions from around the country.
“We were really excited to win this award,” BriarPatch Director of Marketing Rebecca Torpie said. “We wanted to apply to show not only the huge change in programming that we did between the original version and the new, but also how successful and helpful these volunteer hours were, especially during the pandemic, when nonprofits really needed physical help as much as they needed money to keep going.”
Under the current PatchWorks configuration, co-op owners who sign up and work six hours a month at a PatchWorks-approved nonprofit receive 15% off a shopping trip the following month. Those who volunteer for 12 hours can earn two discounted shopping trips.
This version of PatchWorks is a reimagined iteration of an outdated volunteer program run by the co-op. The original BriarPatch “Community Capacity-Building Program” gave volunteers 10 percent off for an entire month when they volunteered three hours at any nonprofit in the community. A review of the program found there was no verification of hours by the nonprofit, and hours were allowed to be banked, which was an unsustainable discount program (at one point, 45 volunteers enrolled in the program cost the store as much as $45,000 per year). Now, nonprofits must apply to be in the program and verify and submit hours via an online platform.
“Since we started the new program in 2020, 341 PatchWorks participants have volunteered 21,367 hours in the community, and the total cost to the co-op in shopping discounts has been about $45,000,” Torpie said.
Read more about BriarPatch’s PatchWorks program.
