WP Password Protection?..

I’m new to WP but I’m hoping this will be a long and fruitful relationship!

I come to WP as a web developer (and writer) building a site that I think (hope) WP will be ideal for. But then my mind turned to a couple of other web projects I’m working on. For one, a library, WP will be ideal. But there’s another that I’m not sure about and maybe you can help.

I manage a website for a non-profit agency that serves the homeless. One of the agency’s program directors wants to be able upload news, calendar info, and photos to an area of a site and invite her volunteers to visit the online area to view the content. I’m sure WP can handle that part fine. The thing is, she wants to be able to password protect the area so only registered users can have access to it — so when you typed in https://www.homlessagency.org/wordpress you’d come to a login screen.

I’m wondering if this may be trying to stretch WP into being a CMS (content management system, like Joomla or Mambo), but it would be great if it could do it.

Thanks for any light you can shed!