New Growth Transit is based in El Dorado Springs, and it serves it’s community as a sort of neighbor-to-neighbor ride share – where community-member volunteers are reimbursed to drive folks to the doctor, work or to get groceries.
Kelly Ast and Kelly Knepp with New Growth Transit spoke about how this volunteer transit model is meeting the needs of their communities.
For the month of September, we're focusing on the health of those living in west and west central Missouri.
Kelly Ast: Our biggest challenge in rural transportation is distance. So, the model of a bus brings a solution to density, and so, in rural communities, we have distance, not density, and that's why micro transit models such as these – and we even see these in the urban areas – seem to be utilized more frequently, and they're preferred.
And so, a volunteer transportation network, to me, meets both those needs because it's more sustainable.
If you have a bus – you have a bus stop, you have a route, you have a full-time driver, you have benefits.
And so, this model meets the needs of the riders because what we don't see is there are not very many standard schedules. You have your manufacturing schedule, you know, you're transporting them at 7:00 a.m. in the morning, you gotta be on the road at 6:00 a.m. They're done anywhere from 3:00 p.m. in the afternoon till 7:00 p.m. at night.
And then you've got agriculture, which is one of the largest employers in the area, as well as all the medical facilities. So, you've got a lot of different rotation and shifts.
Kelly Knepp: So, volunteer drivers – everybody thinks, “Oh, who are they? Is that just the retired people that don't have anything else to do?” But really it isn't. It's just someone who is looking for something to do, but also giving back to the communities that they live in.
We have a variety of volunteers with a variety of different backgrounds, you know, we have gentlemen that were truck drivers for many, a number of years. We have retired schoolteachers. We have just a little bit of everything, and that's what makes our group wonderful because of the variety of backgrounds that they come from.
Kelly Ast: And I think we've utilized something that's always very prevalent in rural communities, and that's volunteers.
"The majority of our volunteer drivers do this because – it's about purpose."Kelly Ast, New Growth Transit
You know, we unfortunately, don't have large endowments. We don't have a lot of money flowing into these rural areas, and so, they're naturally what some people would consider “impoverished,” but we do have the power of people and of volunteers.
And so, last year, in our last contract year, which actually ended in June of 2025, our volunteers and our program drove over a million miles – that's in a 12-month cycle with a little over 65 volunteers.
So, the impact that they're making was completely overseen as an asset to all of these rural communities.
And, you know, those volunteer drivers are receiving a reimbursement of 70 cents a mile, and I think sometimes the reimbursement is a little bit of an incentive, but what we find is that the majority of our volunteer drivers do this because – it's about purpose.
