Staff Highlight: Volunteer Specialist Bri

By Jade Fisher, Communications Specialist

Uniform rows of peanut butter and jam. Vibrant piles of multi-colored produce await the 10AM surge of shoppers. Enticing breads of all brands and types jut out from shelves. Checkout counters gleam from a fresh wipe down. Volunteers prepare the food bank for opening.

Our Hub for Hope is a vital resource for neighbors as food prices remain high. Last year, over 5,000,000 pounds of food and hygiene products fed and helped our neighbors. Each year, reliance on hunger relief organizations only seems to grow.

Volunteers help take care of our community by taking on essential roles that keep the food bank running. Volunteer Specialist Bri Ross is the foundation of our volunteer processes and the program that helps us meet the growing need we’re seeing. We couldn’t do this work, at this scale, without our dedicated volunteers. And training and retaining our exceptional volunteers is an enormous task.

A decade ago, Bri found herself building community by chance. Based on growing online interest, she started a Women of Color Climbing Group in Seattle. She says, “Being the logistics person I am, I took the reins in just like getting people involved, collecting people to help lead the events, it all blossomed into lifetime friendships. I really enjoyed that and I had just gotten my degree in environmental studies so I thought, ‘How can I combine that?’”

Bri ended up working at the Woodland Park Zoo as a Volunteer Engagement Coordinator. She recalls, “I genuinely fell in love with leading a giant community of volunteers. There’s just something fulfilling about supporting people with their chosen passion.”

Over the next ten years, Bri kickstarted volunteer programs and honed processes at a handful of smaller environmental organizations. Including Washington Trails Association.

Bri (on far left with Seattle Torrent Players) helps volunteers find the role or roles that best suit them

At one point in her career, she built a volunteer program from scratch, in another role she worked on solutions with a volunteer community that was doing more growing than they had space for. Each organization comes with a unique set of challenges. Challenges Bri is equipped to take on after ten years of working alongside volunteers.

She is thoughtful and every decision made is based on feedback from colleagues, neighbors, leadership, and data pulled from volunteer management platforms. She explains that her brain “works, like a flow chart. Like in the back of a teen magazine or like a BuzzFeed quiz where I pull everything … My job, overall, is to figure out if the [process] connects with our missions and our core values, and if it's actually something that's sustainable and we can keep doing in the long term.”

Her work right now is focused on an exciting shift to build out different categories and pathways of volunteers depending on their circumstances. Almost a year into the role at Ballard Food Bank, Bri embodies our value of centering relationships and meeting people where they are in the moment every single day.

What brings her joy in the role is, in fact, the variation. “Managing a large group is wearing many hats – and you never get bored. It’s never boring,” Bri said. Working with and meeting unique individuals offers an exciting pace to the role. It also helps that she loves dogs and has learned from her time at Ballard Food Bank that “you can never have too many chihuahuas in one office.”

Bri loves photography and captured these beautiful tomatoes during her time with the harvest team

A person of many talents, Bri enjoys paddle boarding, knitting, pottery, and dog grooming. She’s held many incredible jobs with very different skill sets that set her up greatly for connecting with folks this role. With a background in environmental studies, she says she particularly enjoyed going out with the Harvest program in June where the group trellised tomatoes and harvested cucumbers!

In one instance, as a dog groomer, she used to help groom Representative Pramila Jayapal’s dog. When the Representative visited Ballard Food Bank in October during the government shut down, Bri and Representative Jayapal reunited with a hug and shared sweet anecdotes of Otis Jayapal.

Since May 2025, Bri has trained and inducted over 1,200 volunteers into programs they are best suited for at Ballard Food Bank. She currently coordinates the volunteerism of about (an impressive) 800 active volunteers.

So many volunteer roles are required to keeping our operations running smoothly. From produce sorting, greeting people at the welcome desk, preparing food at the Kindness Café, bagging free groceries and more. It is Bri’s distinctive people approach that ensures our organization can connect each volunteer to the role that will best fit them and best serve our neighbors seeking food and essential resources.