How One Community Turned Neighbors into a Network of Support

Summit Marches On began as a grassroots effort to rally neighbors around year-round change in Summit, New Jersey. Co-founders Tracy Keegan and Lacey Cotter Rzeszowski built the organization around a simple belief: when people are given a clear way to show up, they will.

Over the years, they’ve used SignUpGenius 15–20 times annually to organize initiatives ranging from voter engagement and carpooling to bus excursions. Depending on the project, sign ups helped coordinate anywhere from 20 to 150 participants at a time — often on tight timelines.

But their most urgent work came during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Organizing at the Speed of Community

When COVID reshaped daily life, Summit Marches On quickly pivoted to meet changing local needs.

Using SignUpGenius, they:

• Paired sponsors with 50+ families facing food insecurity due to pandemic-related underemployment
• Coordinated more than 100 volunteer shoppers to provide no-cost, no-contact grocery and prescription delivery for seniors and immunocompromised neighbors
• Built a community-wide mask assembly line, organizing volunteers to cut fabric, sew masks, and deliver finished supplies to frontline medical professionals

Each effort required fast coordination, clear task assignments and reliable follow-through.

Before sign ups, organizing volunteers meant hours of recruiting, scheduling, explaining roles and confirming commitments. Emails overlapped. Texts piled up. Spreadsheets multiplied.

With SignUpGenius, the process became easier than ever. Organizers posted assignments into clearly defined slots, added key details, shared the link with their email list and let volunteers choose how they wanted to contribute. Specific projects could be broken into manageable time slots, allowing volunteers to self-select roles and control their level of participation, without constant back and forth or micromanaging.

As the team put it, the platform brought “game-changing logistical ease,” giving their small but mighty organization the efficiency to focus on impact instead of coordination.

From Crisis Response to Lasting Action

Today, Summit Marches On continues to think globally and act locally. And with a streamlined way to organize people around purpose, they’re able to spend less time wrangling volunteers and more time strengthening their community.

SignUpGenius is proud to support organizations like Summit Marches On that prove meaningful change starts with an organized plan — and neighbors ready to step up.

Need a better way to organize support in your community?