Tag: volunteers

How Summer Hunger is Impacting Kids

It’s finally summer in Chicago! Kids in our community are free to play, explore, and have fun with their friends, but some will experience the “summer slide”. According to Feed the Children the summer slide happens when kids do not get the nutrition their bodies and minds need to keep developing and their abilities and knowledge regress instead of progressing over summer. 

For every four kids you see at the park laughing and playing tag, one will go home to a fridge and pantry with little to no food. 

It’s a sobering reality when we think about the fun of summertime and the mix of stressed-out parents trying to figure out how to provide enough nutritious food while struggling to make ends meet. 

Families that are enrolled in SNAP (formerly known as food stamps) have some help with paying for groceries, but during the school year, their kids are most likely receiving free or reduced breakfast and lunch at school. 

While this injustice is frustrating and saddening, you can help make a difference in the lives of families in our neighborhood. 

Through June 30, all donations up to $10,000 will be doubled, thanks to anti-hunger champions, Ted and Dawn Helwig for their match challenge. Every $1 = 16 meals. Make a difference with a gift, today.

The Friendship Center can provide a family with free fresh food and pantry items twice a month. There are no income requirements or address restrictions. We can also help families enroll in SNAP, Medicaid, and refer them to other local agencies for additional vital resources. 

Additionally, we need more friends to volunteer and help us serve the growing number of neighbors visiting the pantry every week. There are volunteer shifts every day of the week at various times. Sign in to the volunteer portal and select a time that works for your schedule.

We are grateful to be a part of a caring and generous community who seeks to alleviate hunger and help their neighbors whenever they can.

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.