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Volunteers are Needed to Help with Senior Meals-on-Wheels and Their Senior Meal Congregate Programs
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Added: 05/05/2004
Type: Summary
Viewed: 1215 time(s)
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Volunteers are Needed to Help with Senior Meals-on-Wheels and Their Senior Meal Congregate Programs
Dwindling volunteer resources mean a call to those who have a few hours per week to help serve meals to seniors in their homes and in congregate meal locations. While many volunteers come in over the holidays, the onset of summer means that many volunteers will have to cut back or eliminate their hours. This is a great time however, for college students to work on community projects or complete community requirements of internship programs.
Senior Citizens are the primary users of such programs as Meals-on-Wheels that help them maintain the necessary nutritional balances, which are necessary to stay happy and healthy. Without senior meal programs such as Meals-on-Wheels and the many other community and privately run programs, many seniors would go without an adequate meal, and most would suffer nutritionally.
Most programs however, depend heavily if not exclusively on volunteer help.
During holiday times of year, there is an abundance of volunteers who donate their free time and time off from work to help deliver meals and serve and clean up in congregate meal settings. “These volunteers are absolutely essential during this time of year because so many more seniors register for Holiday meal programs than do other times of year,” says Steve Hart, spokesperson for MealCall (http://www.MealCall.org).
However, after the holidays, and especially during summer vacations when people take family vacations, the numbers of seniors that need meal services do not fall off much, but the amount of time that volunteers have does start to diminish. Local meal locations often find themselves working around family vacation schedules and stay at home moms don’t have the time they do during the rest of the year when kids are in school.
“Now is a perfect time however, for college kids to become involved,” says Hart. Serving meals to seniors is a great community service project and something that many schools look favorably on community service involvement when looking at during the college applications review process. A few college scholarships also give favorable treatment to students that donate their personal time. According to one unnamed college scholarship panel member, “We want to give an advantage to those people who are willing to give back to their community. The fact that someone donates their time is a strong indicator that the money they receive in scholarship grants will do the most good in the long run.”
Not all senior meals programs need assistance, but most do. Finding such programs hasn’t been as easy as it should be until MealCall.org came along. Since senior meals programs are not under any universal directive or authority at a national level, and each operates independently, there are few naming conventions, no central authority to report to, no national centralized direction for all senior meals programs, and very little marketing money, it can be tough to find something in your own community much less one that would serve a senior parent in another city.
This is where MealCall.org comes in. You can find this information online and make a direct connection with meal locations, and often write to the program manager via email. Since programs may have waiting lists, it is also possible to contact several meal organizations from a single source to find the one that can get you in the soonest.
If you don’t find one near you, all is not lost. MealCall.org has a form that you can request additional information, whether to volunteer or to obtain senior meals, even if they are not online yet. “We rarely have a situation that we cannot find anything,” says Geri Waters, a MealCall.org service representative.
ABOUT MEALCALL.ORG
MealCall.org only started in November 2003 and is staffed by volunteers who assist seniors and family caregivers to find congregate senior meal locations and local Meals-on-Wheels. For more information, contact MealCall, directly online at www.MealCall.org.
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