Located in the City of Toronto and offering top-notch alternative, creative and educational programs, The Remix Project is an arts and culture incubator formed to level the playing field for marginalized and under-resourced youth.
“We offer free programming to select youth who show talent and promise but face barriers to access it,” Director of Partnerships and Community Engagement Amber Morley said. “Essentially, we help create pathways forward for those individuals in the arts and culture industry.”
Morley was a participant in the program during one of their first years of operation, and went on to be one of the first alumni to serve on their Board of Directors. This year, she rejoined The Remix Project team following a career in politics and learned about jiiWA — a Toronto-based startup that’s built technology to help charities and their funders better understand their impact and the people they serve through data — once she began her new position.
“Working with jiiWA has been great,” Morley said. “It’s easy, it’s accessible, the team is incredibly collaborative and very responsive and it’s allowing us to really formalize our processes in a much more coherent way.”
The Remix Project began before the age of social media and before the use of digital tools was as day-to-day as it is now, Morley said. Up until they started working with jiiWA, they were using paper forms to track participant’s attendance, distribute surveys and more.
“It’s allowed us to go digital and to create a cloud of information that can be accessed internally by all of our staff. As a charitable organization providing free programming and receiving charitable dollars, it’s incredibly important for us to have recorded metrics and to be able to measure our outputs,” Morley said.
“How many youths are getting jobs in their field? How many hours are they spending here? All kinds of metrics, evaluations, surveys and more have become simplified and centralized with jiiWA.”
One of the first product features The Remix Project implemented was the ability to track their participant’s attendance to monitor hours spent at the facility and to make sure they’re meeting their weekly requirements. Another feature Morley finds to be incredibly useful is the ability for staff members to book spaces within the charity's facilities through jiiWA.
“We have recently moved into our permanent home here at Daniel’s Waterfront. This is a first for us — we’ve never really had our own space in this way that we weren’t sharing,” Morley said. “As it relates to booking the various rooms within our space, jiiWA is a great tool which our staff can turn to in order to make sure we’re not double-booking sessions. It’s very helpful in our organization and execution of day-to-day programming.”
Morley said The Remix Project is excited about what the future looks like with jiiWA.
“We are modernizing and growing as an organization. To have a central management system like jiiWA during this time and to work with a team that collaborates with us and is so engaged with really wanting to make sure the product is customized and most appropriate for our use is extraordinarily helpful,” Morley said. “We really, really appreciate that and are confident that in the future as it relates to reporting out and capturing all of the great and important work we do, we’d be able to have hard data to help us tell our story through jiiWA.”
Learn more about The Remix Project: https://theremixproject.com/