Welcome to BuiltOnAir, a podcast and video series about all things Airtable. Each episode, we talk with someone active in the Airtable community to discuss their experiences and showcase an interesting way they’ve used Airtable in their work.

This episode we welcome Anton Preisinger, founder and director of Northwest Hospitality, a non-profit focused on simple needs outreach for the homeless. Based in Washington state, he focuses on decentralized service and bringing real help to people wherever they are.

The majority of Northwest Hospitality’s backend is done with Airtable. He has one primary management database that covers several aspects of the work. During his showcase of this base, Anton talks about various challenges and issues he came across while developing the base, then what he did to find solutions to each one categorically. 

The base helps the non-profit to do things differently than is traditionally done by allowing various metrics to be tracked and updated without a large hassle, including gift cards and supplies inventory distributed to homeless people in the community. Anton shows how some of these metrics are interacted with within the Airtable framework, and how efforts from volunteers are organized.

Airtable Blocks has played a big part in expanding the possibilities with the base also, and Anton goes more in depth on the various functions and uses for each block added to the base.

Anton is currently developing a base to distribute haircut vouchers to homeless people that is simple and streamlined, without a lot of paperwork or other churn that normally accompanies the process of getting needs met in an organized way. He describes his enthusiasm for Airtable by saying that “each time you make a new base it’s like Christmas!”

Learn more about Northwest Hospitality and contribute or volunteer on their website | 

Find Anton and his other bases in Airtable Universe | 

UPDATE Jan 2020: Anton informed us that an additional resource to help the homeless has been added to their website that overlays a slick UI on an Airtable backend. You can see it here! 

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View the video demo from this episode | 

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