Apply & approve
A real application, a real review.
Families apply once a year. The coordinator reviews, approves, and every decision is logged in an audit trail — no more digging through old emails to remember what was decided.
MedinaCHF by ForgeKit
Live · In productionA real membership platform. Built for one real community.
MedinaCHF is a Christian homeschool social community in Medina, Ohio — applications, dues, events, a member portal, and a coordinator workspace, all live and in daily use.
It replaced a Wix site, manual PayPal, and a physical planning board. Now it’s the first ForgeKit-built system running for a real, paying, non-technical customer — not a demo, not a seed user.
The problem
A growing community was running on a Wix site and a paper board.
MedinaCHF started small and kept growing — more families, more Signature Events, more volunteers planning activities. But applications came in by email, dues were tracked by hand, and the community’s whole planning rhythm lived on a physical corkboard that only worked if you saw it in person.
Nothing about that scaled. There was no real record of who’d applied, who’d paid, or who was covering which event — just a coordinator holding it all together from memory.
MedinaCHF gives the community a real system — one place for applications, dues, events, and planning that everyone can actually see.
What broke down before
- Applications tracked by email, easy to lose track of who applied
- Dues paid by hand, no real record of who owed what
- A physical planning board nobody could see unless they showed up
- No way to tell who’d actually attended vs. just said they would
- Announcements that needed a “did everyone see this?” follow-up
- A member directory that only existed in one coordinator’s head
What’s actually in it
Applications, dues, events, and a real community — all in one place.
Dues & membership
Nobody wonders who’s paid.
Annual dues, tracked per family per membership year, with automatic reminders instead of a coordinator chasing people down one text at a time.
Events & attendance
RSVP is intent. Attendance is fact.
The two are tracked separately, on purpose — so membership requirements are based on who actually showed up, not just who said they would.
Planning & community
The planning board, finally digital.
Members claim events to plan, post ideas, vote in polls, and post to a real community feed — the physical corkboard’s job, done by software everyone can see.
A coordinator workspace with real analytics.
Application review, dues tracking with CSV export, membership-status tracking, and age-distribution analytics — the leadership tools a growing volunteer-run community actually needs.
Built for MedinaCHF. Adaptable for yours.
ForgeKit can build this for your organization too.
The same shape — applications, dues, events with real attendance tracking, a member portal, a coordinator workspace — fits any small membership-based community running on volunteer effort and good intentions instead of a real system.
Church small groups
Membership, attendance, and volunteer coordination for a ministry or small-group program.
Homeschool co-ops & social groups
The exact shape MedinaCHF proves — applications, dues, a shared calendar, real community.
Alumni & parent associations
Member directories, dues tracking, and event planning for an ongoing volunteer-run group.
Hobby & interest clubs
Any recurring membership community that needs real tools without hiring a developer.
After launch
This isn’t a site we shipped once and left.
MedinaCHF’s coordinator has requested well over a hundred real changes since launch — new fields, different rules, things that didn’t fit once real families started using it. Each one goes through the same system that built the platform in the first place: understand the request, trace what it touches, make the change safely, keep a record of what happened and why.
That’s the ownership half of this story, not just the build speed. She doesn’t file a ticket and wait on a developer’s schedule — she says what needs to change, in plain language, and ForgeKit makes it real.
Where that stands today
The part still catching up to the full vision: right now, ForgeKit is still the translation layer between what she asks for and the actual software change — we review what gets proposed before it ships, usually within days. The system does the harder part of that loop on its own already: understanding the request, tracing what it touches, holding a record of what changed and why.
What it can’t do yet is act on that alone, with nobody watching — that’s not a trust problem with her, it’s a trust problem with the safety net itself. Making that safety net reliable enough not to need a person catching its mistakes is the real work left, and it’s a harder bar than “it worked once.”
Where this actually stands
MedinaCHF is live in production for one real community today. Standing this up for a different organization means real customization — your organization’s name, dues amount, membership rules, and brand — the same way every ForgeKit build is fit to the business it serves, not a one-size-fits-all product.
Run a membership community? Let’s talk about standing this up for you.
Tell us a bit about your organization — how many members, how you run things today — and we’ll tell you honestly whether this fits.