FIELD STORY: FLINT FREEDOM SCHOOLS
How Flint Freedom Schools Brought Its Staff Tools Into One Portal
A summer youth literacy program in Flint is using Civic OS to bring communication, document storage, time tracking, and staff coordination into one portal; so their team can spend less time managing tools and more time with the students in their care.
ORGANIZATION
Flint Freedom Schools Collaborative
LOCATION
Flint, Michigan
TYPE
501(c)(3) Nonprofit
BUILT FOR
Staff Operations Portal
Every summer, the Flint Freedom Schools Collaborative brings on a seasonal team to run its youth literacy program. Site coordinators, seasonal staff, and office administrators spend their summer days teaching, mentoring, and caring for the students so they can read, learn, and grow.
Behind that work sat a familiar setup: communication in one place, documents in another, time clocking somewhere else, and resourcing spread across a handful of tools. None of it was broken. It got the program through prior summers. But when the staff shared their feedback after last year’s session, one theme came through clearly; the tools were spread out and hard to use, and the work on site suffered for it.
(More about the Flint Freedom Schools Collaborative.)
The inflection point
FFSC didn’t need an expensive, enterprise custom build; and they didn’t have the size to justify one. What they needed was for the everyday work of running a summer program; onboarding staff, tracking hours, storing documents, assigning tasks, logging incidents; to live in one place their team could actually use.
That’s the gap Civic OS stepped into. Over the winter, ahead of the 2026 season, Civic OS worked with the FFSC team to design a custom staff portal shaped around how they actually operate. The pieces that had been scattered across separate tools came together into a single, user-friendly platform.
A look inside the portal
Screenshots from FFSC’s live staff portal.
What changed
Two months into the season, the difference shows up where it matters: on site. Staff clock in, submit documents, request reimbursements, log incidents, and pick up their tasks from one place instead of chasing four. Site leads see their own site’s data. Office administrators see across the whole program. Everyone works from the same source of truth.
When something needs adjusting; a new field, a tweak to a workflow, a quick fix; the FFSC team can reach Dan Kurin, Civic OS’s founder, directly. He has been responsive, creative, and quick to turn requests around. For a small nonprofit running a fast-moving seasonal program, that kind of access matters as much as the software itself.
At a statewide convening of Michigan out-of-school-time programs this year, each region had five minutes to share something exciting from their year. Ryan Beuthin, FFSC’s Director of Operations, chose to speak for his region; and spent four of those five minutes on Civic OS. What he kept coming back to wasn’t a feature list. It was the partnership:
“Civic OS met us exactly at our point of need and built a well-functioning, custom solution. We had outgrown our mountain of spreadsheets and digital tools, but did not have the size to merit an expensive custom software build. Civic OS gave us everything we needed and continually went the extra mile.”
Ryan Beuthin, Director of Operations, Flint Freedom Schools Collaborative
A platform, not a product
The Flint Freedom Schools Collaborative needed a staff operations portal. That’s what Civic OS is for them. But the same platform is running very different systems for other partners; a self-service booking system for a volunteer-run neighborhood clubhouse, a multilingual intake and referral system for an organization serving immigrants and refugees, and a tool-lending library for a neighborhood hub.
The building blocks are the same: forms, permissions, calendars, notifications, file storage, and data management. What changes is how they’re assembled. Each organization gets a system shaped around the way it actually works; not a one-size-fits-all product it has to bend to fit.
Why Civic OS works differently
Most technology vendors sell a fixed product. Civic OS is a configurable platform built from modular components; forms, calendars, permissions, payments, notifications; that can be assembled to fit the way your organization actually works.
As an L3C (low-profit limited liability company), Civic OS prioritizes mission over profit. Your data belongs to you. There’s no vendor lock-in. And the pricing is designed for organizations that measure their budgets in thousands, not millions.
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Facility booking, public calendar, and electronic payments for a volunteer-run clubhouse.
2
Flint Freedom Schools Collaborative
LIVE
A staff operations portal that brings onboarding, time tracking, reimbursements, incidents, and task coordination into one place.
3
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LAUNCHING
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