Category: Volunteers

A Summer Sorter’s Experience at The Friendship Center

I started volunteering at The Friendship Center when I was four years old. My dad is a teacher, and I volunteer with him in the summer. Once COVID hit, volunteering obviously stopped, but this summer I started to look into coming back. Like a lot of places, there are age restrictions, but then I saw the Summer Sorters program on Fridays for kids 11 and up. I kinda forced my parents to sign me up! 

I immediately loved it. It combines the good feeling that comes from helping people, and organizing, which I love to do. While clients are finishing shopping, we kids are preparing and sorting other things. This includes what is going on the shelves, making boxes for home delivery the next day, organizing pet food for the third Saturday of the month Pet Food Pantry, grinding coffee, or – my favorite – peeling a scratched-up protective coating off of a steel table. (I know that last one sounds weird, but it’s great to do when you are waiting and is very satisfying!) Once the front shopping area is open, we restock the shelves with everything they need from the back, from fresh produce to food rescue pastries to toiletries and more. We end up laughing with each other by the end of the two-hour shift, even if we just met.

After a couple weeks of Summer Sorters, I asked Karen if there were other times I could help out. I filled out a volunteer form, and I’m now an official volunteer. I even helped cook dinner this month! I now sign up for shifts on their great volunteer website. You can see what shifts are open at what times and what a shift entails. 

I find volunteering – especially at The Friendship Center – to be a very rewarding experience. My parents have raised me to do my best to always help others. One thing in particular is that no matter what happens, you are in no way, shape, or form better than who you are giving a helping hand to. In a lot of cases, someone has just hit a hard time and is otherwise no different than anyone else.

I always feel good afterwards because volunteering gives me a purpose and something to focus on. In this crazy world where you can feel so helpless, it is always good to find something to ground you, that helps you ignore everything else and focus on what you are doing. And in volunteering at The Friendship Center, you know that you’re not just helping yourself but your neighbors as well.

-Cora Weiss

About the Author:

Cora is a soon-to-be 7th grader at a local elementary school. She lives in the neighborhood with her parents (her mom, Kelly, is a Friendship Center board member) and their adorable dog, Scotch.

One Volunteer’s Experience at The Friendship Center

What is three hours? That is how much time I spend building food boxes for senior and home-bound clients at The Friendship Center (TFC) every Saturday. It is humbling and heartwarming to see the program’s transformation. What started as one packer working with three drivers to deliver groceries for roughly 30 clients monthly has blossomed into three volunteer packers building boxes for a dozen drivers who hand-deliver groceries to more than 75 clients monthly.

When the pandemic started, I was working at a local Alderman’s office, where we launched a weekly Call Crew to check on seniors and connect them to resources. These calls quickly exposed vulnerable seniors in the ward who were rationing their food because they did not have access to safe forms of transportation or the financial means to restock via grocery delivery apps. Coming from a nonprofit background where you solve problems on a zero budget, I knew I had to tap into my network. TFC delivered – seeing the program go from me emailing Ross Outten every Friday a laundry list of names of those in need and him serving as both packer and delivery driver to coming on as the program’s first volunteer was a tremendous honor.

I hypothesize that many of you reading this feel similarly about the time and treasures you give to TFC. There is a dedicated group that secures and distributes pet food every third Saturday, which allows us to include it for Home Delivery clients with four-legged companions. Others reading this help TFC by hosting food drives that enable us to build boxes catered to each person’s specific dietary preferences and needs, including microwave meals and easy-to-open cans. To everyone who supports TFC in one form or another, know that your unique impact causes a positive ripple.

-Jesi Peters

About the author:

Jesi Peters was The Friendship Center’s first Home Delivery volunteer and packs boxes for clients every Saturday. Jesi lives in Chicago with her beloved cat, Tommy, and is the new Director of Development for Tree House Humane Society, one of our Pet Food Pantry partners.

New Friends! Michelle, Susan & Mike

Every few months we’ll introduce you to some of the people whose efforts are at the heart of the Friendship Center’s work and community engagement.

Photo of Friendship Center board member and volunteer Michelle Cahoon
Michelle Cahoon

Michelle Cahoon has been a volunteer at the Friendship Center since July 2019 after spending 30+ years in the financial services industry as the CFO of an investment management firm and a certified public accountant.

She has been a long-time financial supporter of the Greater Chicago Food Depository due to her strong belief that no one should go hungry and becoming a regular volunteer at the pantry was a top goal after her retirement.

Michelle joined the board in April 2021 and brings both her hands-on knowledge from volunteering as well as her financial skills to that role. Michelle enjoys food, wine and travel and has been an avid Blackhawks fan since before their recent Stanley Cup wins.

Photo of Friendship Center board member and volunteer Susan Casey
Susan Casey

Susan Casey joined the Friendship Center board in April 2021 and helps with Saturday food deliveries to seniors. She has lived in the North Park community with her family for over 20 years, where she’s enjoyed volunteer leadership roles in the local community association and a local school.

As a program manager for the environmental nonprofit Seven Generations Ahead, Susan helps K-12 schools reduce waste. She was a middle school science teacher prior to that. Susan looks forward to contributing her nonprofit, education, and community-building experience to the work and mission of the Friendship Center.

If you recently saw the Friendship Center in the Chicago Tribune, FOX-32, or WTTW, then you were looking at the handiwork of our PR guru/volunteer Mike Roach (pictured above, holding the Trib op-ed by Friendship Center volunteer Jaime Freedman). After 20+ years making news for national brands including Budweiser, Harley-Davidson, KFC, and Snickers, Mike launched his own agency to help entrepreneurs, nonprofits and small businesses elevate their storytelling.

Mike loves visiting farmers markets with his wife, Katie, and daughter, Ella. In fact, it was at the Ravenswood Farmers Market where he first found out about our food pantry and got involved. We became his first pro bono client! You can follow Mike’s travels to markets around the world via his Instagram feed @AtTheFarmersMarket.

“There are so many unsung pantry volunteers doing such amazing things, it’s humbling to be able to help tell their story,” Mike said. “I just hope this media attention inspires other professionals in the neighborhood — be they accountants, plumbers, painters or social media gurus — to join me in donating some of their time and talent to support this important work.”

New Pantry Friends on the Southside

Friendship Center volunteer Bonnie Tawse (above, with her friend Elizabeth) got involved with the Free Street Theater because of her son, Sam, and when the pandemic hit, they launched a pop-up pantry (or, as they call it, an “alt-pantry”) at the Storyfront Theater location in the Back of the Yards neighborhood on Chicago’s South Side.

They are working hard to reach underserved communities in their area with an innovative approach and a lot of grassroots energy, but they don’t have the same access to bulk food resources as we do.

Because of our committed network of supporters, sometimes we actually have a surplus of certain grocery items. When this happens, we “resource-share” with neighboring food pantries to make sure nothing goes to waste. In this case, we were able to send items to a part of the city that really needed the help, and support them as they build and grow their own much-needed food pantry.