The Road Ahead
News from the Transit Frontier
WINTER 2026
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Total Network Numbers
Rides: 1,735,865
Miles Driven: 8,597,501
Riders: 18,728
Volunteers: 3,632
Network Sites: 181
America’s Volunteer Driver Center
A National Solution for a National Need
Volunteer transportation looks different everywhere, and it matters everywhere. Across the country, millions of older adults and people with mobility challenges rely on volunteer drivers for rides to medical appointments, the grocery store, work, and other essential destinations. Yet these programs often operate quietly and locally, without national visibility or support. America’s Volunteer Driver Center (AVDC), a program of ITNAmerica, was created to help change the way Americans think about and support nonprofit transportation. The work elevates the role of volunteer drivers and strengthens the nonprofit programs that depend on them.
From the beginning, AVDC has been a collaborative effort. The initiative was planned with input from nonprofit transportation providers, volunteer drivers, and subject matter experts who understand the realities of delivering rides at the local level. That collaboration continues today through two advisory bodies. The Leadership Roundtable brings together leaders from business, philanthropy, and government to help guide national strategy, while the Advisory Council grounds the work in practitioner and community experience. Each volunteer transportation program reflects its own community by setting its own hours, policies, and philosophy. Even so, the shared truth is universal. Volunteer drivers make independence, dignity, and connection possible for people in every community in the country.
While ITNAmerica prepares the national public information campaign, something important is already happening behind the scenes. Nonprofit transportation providers from across the country are signing up with America’s Volunteer Driver Center. Hundreds have already joined. Each one reflects a different community, a different name on the door, a different way of organizing volunteers and delivering rides. Some operate a few days a week. Some run full schedules. Some serve rural counties. Some serve busier suburbs. All of them share one goal: helping local neighbors get where they need to go.
AVDC welcomes providers to register first, building a strong foundation before inviting volunteers to step forward. When the campaign launches, those volunteers will not be signing up into the unknown. They will see real programs in their own communities, ready to receive them. If your nonprofit transportation service would like to recruit volunteer drivers, AVDC invites you to register through the Provider Portal. If your community does not yet have a service, ITNCountry can help you start one. Experience is helpful, but care and community spirit matter most.
Map of AVDC Providers
Featured Volunteer Driver and Rider
Jim Tincher- Volunteer Driver Profile
“If you’ve been blessed… you need to give back something. You don’t need to just sit there and reap the rewards and not give anything back to the people in the community.”
Jim Tincher was looking for a way to volunteer in his hometown, Lexington, Kentucky. His wife was already volunteering in the community and encouraged him to find a way to give back. When he read in the newspaper that local businesswoman, Gale Reece, was starting a new nonprofit service, ITNBluegrass, to provide dignified transportation for older adults, he asked her if he could help. ITN’s mission resonated with Jim because he was experiencing it in his own family. His mother was thinking about stopping driving and needed a way to get around independently.
That was 17 years ago. Jim has been with ITNBluegrass ever since that first conversation with Gale. Jim has now served on the ITNBluegrass Board of Directors; he has delivered 2,876 volunteer rides since 2008 and he is still driving. He is retired now from a career with Graybar Electric, an employee owned Fortune 500 company celebrating 100 years of business in 2027. Jim was married for 49 years before his beloved wife, Judy, passed away. He has two children, four grandchildren, and two great grandchildren.
He says his volunteer driving for ITNBluegrass has taught him a lot about Lexington. When asked if there is any one ride he remembers, he quickly says, “Yes, it is one of the first rides I ever did. I was late picking up my ITN member, and for the entire 15 minutes it took me to get him to his destination, he chewed me out. I have never been late again.”
Bill Goodman, Story Teller – Rider Profile
Bill Goodman is the soon-to-be-retired Executive Director for Kentucky Humanities, an independent, nonprofit affiliate of the National Endowment for the Humanities in Washington, D.C., founded by Lyndon Johnson in 1965. Bill has held this position for the past 10 years and he is proud of the Kentucky story he has helped to tell during his decade at the helm.
Now, Bill has a story of his own to tell, and he tells is passionately, with the art and humanity of a good story teller.
Bill has been riding with ITNBluegrass for about four years. He had never heard of ITNBluegrass before his journey began. Now, he says it is the most positive aspect of his low vision journey and he wants everyone to help share the news, both for people who need transportation and people who can help by spreading the word or volunteering to drive.
“I run into people all the time,” Bill says. “It’s either someone who is assisting me—and I always appreciate that—or it might be somebody who is asking me about my disease, my glaucoma. It might be somebody I meet that doesn’t know I have a low-vision problem. It might be somebody that sees me with my cane, and I take the opportunity to ask them a couple of questions if they are in need of transportation, such as ‘Do you know about ITN or do you know about the Bluegrass Council for the Blind?’ Nine times out of ten they are not aware of those services.”
Bill has suggestions for healthcare providers, too. He encourages “…the assistance you might get from an ophthalmologist or from any doctor who may be dealing with aging, they could go a long way in supporting and helping not only individuals or ITN, many other aspects of society today that need the support as you get older, whether you get that from your family or not.”
For people he meets daily who are coming into their retirement years, Bill plants the idea of using their new found freedom to volunteer. “I run into people who are either recently retired or looking forward to not working a daily job that don’t have any plans and that have plenty of volunteer opportunities facing them but haven’t given a second thought to volunteering, much less volunteering for ITN, for example. And when they hear about it, they brighten up, they embrace it, they think it’s a great idea, and almost as if they were saying, ‘Why didn’t I think of that?’ ”
Feature Story
Rides In Sight
A National Information & Referral Service for Older Adult Transportation
Americans outlive their decision to stop driving by about ten years. Yet few of us make plans for what happens next—how will we get to the doctor’s office, the pharmacy, or the weekly Mahjong game at the senior center when we no longer drive?
Rides in Sight (RIS) is ITNAmerica’s answer to this question. RIS is the nation’s largest and most comprehensive resource of transportation options for older adults and others with mobility challenges. Rides in Sight is continuously updated by a team of researchers aided by AI, as well as crowdsourcing from the public to suggest updates and additional transportation providers. The database is specially built to meet the needs of older adults and people with mobility challenges and has over 10,000 entries including volunteer-based nonprofits, municipal transportation services, public transit and paratransit, taxis and rideshares, non-emergency medical transportation providers, senior centers, and more.
The free, searchable RIS database is available online to the public at www.ridesinsight.org where finding local transportation options is as easy as plugging in your zip code. For those who don’t use the internet or need a little help, RIS also has a toll-free hotline (1-855-60-RIDES) staffed from 8am-5pm Eastern Time, Monday through Friday with trained representatives to help each caller find the best local transportation options to meet their unique needs.
ITNCountry
Partnering with the Health Foundation for Western and Central New York
ITNAmerica is proud to welcome seven new ITNCountry sites created in partnership with the Health Foundation for Western and Central New York. These organizations join both the ITNCountry network and their own learning for training and peer support.
Over the next two years, the New York group, named the Accelerate Community Transportation (ACT) Program, will work to expand transportation options across the 16county region served by the Health Foundation. The project focuses on improving access to healthcare for underserved communities, and the participating organizations reflect a diverse range of service missions.
Participating organizations include:
Compeer Buffalo- Provides mental health support services in Greater Buffalo.
CAPCO – A community action program serving Cortland County.
King Urban Life Center – A social service agency serving low-income families in Greater Buffalo.
Love INC of Springfield – A long-standing agency providing rides in Erie and Cattaraugus counties.
Madison County Rural Health Council – Operates a volunteer transportation program for medical appointments in Madison County.
New Neighbors Coalition – Based at St. Luke’s Episcopal Church, serving new Americans.
Orleans County Office on Aging – Runs a volunteer transportation program for older adults in Orleans County.
“Everyone deserves access to reliable, safe transportation so they can get to the doctor, buy food at the grocery store, or stay connected with friends and family. That’s why supporting sustainable approaches to meeting transportation needs is so important. We are grateful to collaborate with ITNAmerica and to learn about the innovative solutions that our nonprofit community partners will bring to ACT.”
– Nora OBrien Suric, PhD, President of the Health Foundation for Western & Central New York.
Tech Updates
Our Chief Technology Officer, Alan Fried, is like the Wizard of Oz, the man behind the curtain who makes it all happen. Only unlike the Great and Powerful Oz, Alan is no charlatan. He is the man who, more than 25 years ago, worked side by side with our team to build ITNRides, the first nonprofit volunteer transportation software.
Since those early days in Portland, Maine, working in one windowless room over the Southern Maine Agency on Aging, ITNAmerica has become a virtual, national organization with technology that also supports Rides in Sight, America’s Volunteer Driver Center, and the Community in the Cloud.
The transportation landscape continues to change, and information technology is the invisible hand in this transformation. We have moved to the Salesforce platform and we have a whole technology team as well as a trusted Salesforce developer working on our virtual world. What is critically important to value in this journey is that technology serves people, and the way to assure this happens is for the architects and engineers who build and maintain this invisible infrastructure to listen, not only to the people who are already using the software, but to those whose needs have not yet been met.
Alan has just spent a year meeting with people who help older adults live safely and independently in their own homes and communities. With this behind-the-scenes work, and support from the Next50 Foundation, ITNAmerica is rolling out a major new feature set for ITNRides. So many of the services people need to remain safely and independently in their own homes depend on transportation. Age-Friendly Services builds on the strength of ITNRides and empowers nonprofit organizations to coordinate and manage essential volunteer support.
Age-Friendly Services in ITNRides, Now at Your Service
Within ITNRides, Age-Friendly Services make it easy to manage volunteer help that doesn’t involve transporting a client but is critical to daily living. Examples include prescription and grocery pickup and delivery, wellness visits and friendly check-ins, light yardwork and home tasks, dog walking, decluttering and home safety support.
Many providers already offer services where the exact time is arranged later. Now ITNRides supports flexible date and time requests, so clients can request a service without locking in a specific schedule, and volunteer follow-up coordination so volunteers can confirm details directly with clients, preserving the personal touch.
To better support volunteer engagement, Age Friendly Services allows volunteers to choose the services they want to support. The result is lower administrative burden, more fulfilled requests and happier volunteers. This efficiency fulfills missions without increasing budgets, especially since Age Friendly Services will not increase the cost of ITNRides for communities.
If your organization is exploring ways to broaden services and improve efficiency, now is the time to see what ITNRides can do.
Upcoming Events
2026 Philanthropic Collaborative for Volunteer Transportation
Wednesday, April 22, 2026
1:00 PM – 2:15 PM ET
America’s Volunteer Driver Center: A national grassroots approach for a national need
The 2026 Philanthropic Collaborative will explore how America’s Volunteer Driver Center, the national center of the public information campaign for volunteer driver recruitment, is turning grassroots action into national impact.
Join leaders from philanthropy, healthcare, business, and government for this focused virtual conversation.
Register for the Philanthropic Collaborative
Now More than Just Rides- ITNCountry and ITNRides Demo Webinar
Thursday, April 30, 2026
2:00 PM ET
ITNAmerica has been hard at work improving and expanding the functionality of our software ITNRides. Come and learn about all the new things that ITNRides can do, our improved training site, and what’s planned for the next few months.
