Volunteers Week is a chance to recognise the amazing contribution volunteers make to our communities. We want to say a huge thank you to our volunteers in out in the community, and also to our colleagues who have volunteered for the Buddy Club in this last year.
Our Good Grub Club
Volunteers play a massive role in the success of our Good Grub Clubs (GGC) which are all about low-cost meal ideas that taste great and provide people with the nutrition they need. Since March 2020 Good Grub Club has been virtual. Nothing about it has changed, apart from how we run it. This means we deliver boxes to families at home and they cook-along with us online.
Our Community Development Officer, Lucy, said:
“I’m really proud of our volunteers and families for the way they have adapted to our new virtual style Good Grub Club over the last 10 months. Adapting the club to continue to run during these times has been challenging, but it’s so great to see our families making the effort to cook nutritious food together at home.”
We want to help relieve the financial pressure families face during school breaks, while also promoting healthy recipes that are easy to make and low in cost. And it’s the dedication of our volunteers that makes this possible.
We chatted to some of them, and this is what they said about volunteering for the GGC:
Volunteering at the GGC was an opportunity to get involved and do something useful especially during lockdown. You don’t see the poverty that’s around until you do something like this, it’s been very rewarding to know that I’ve been a part of helping families have a meal. It’s only a few hours of my time a week and it’s been a real privilege to be able to help.
Volunteer Whitehill and Bordon Good Grub Club
Being in lockdown shut away and not able to see people can make you feel pretty helpless. I was able to do something to help someone else by volunteering at the GGC. It’s been very therapeutic especially for someone like me, when you’re over seventy you can often feel invisible and so to be able to volunteer and do something useful is as huge boost to my self-esteem. I think volunteering is the thing to be doing particularly at times like this. It’s been great!
Volunteer Whitehill and Bordon Good Grub Club
We want to be the centre of community, so there is always someone, somewhere they can go to and the Good Grub Club has helped us do that. We want to serve all the people in Millbrook and treat everyone the same, because we are all the same.
(speaking on behalf of the community church) – Volunteer Millbrook GGC
The Good Grub Club throughout lockdown has been so beneficial to us. It got us out of the house and doing things where we might not have done it otherwise. It’s very enjoyable.
Volunteer Millbrook GGC
The Buddy Club
And its’s not just out in our communities, that we’ve experienced the kindness and generosity that makes volunteers so special. Since the beginning of lockdown, we, as an organisation set up the Buddy Club.
We found that a lot of our customers were struggling. They were struggling with their mental health and some were struggling to access food and prescriptions because they felt too anxious to leave their homes.
We also found that some had little or no support from family or friends and had no one to turn to in times of despair and need, and we did not want our customers to suffer in silence.
So, to help combat these feelings and to help our customers get the essentials they need throughout this time, we launched the Buddy Club. A scheme set up to provide regular companionship and emotional support through daily phone calls.
Anyone can be a Buddy at Abri, no matter what their job is. We have colleagues from our Senior Leadership team to colleagues in Housing, Trades, our Customer Contact Centre and more. There are colleagues from all areas of the business. All of whom have volunteered their time to support people in need.
Since it began last year, the teams have:
- Engaged with over 9,000 customers
- Completed over 6981 callbacks
- Received 223 referrals
- Signed up 938 customers to the Buddy Club
It’s been fantastic to see so many of our colleagues come together to do something amazing for our customers. And we’ve had some lovely feedback from them:
“Thanks for keeping me sane, I have felt less alone having someone to talk too.”
“Having someone to chat with makes me feel normal again.”
“You are the only person I talk to and it’s been really helpful.”
“It’s nice to be able to have a laugh during a time like this and to talk about the café even though we aren’t there, we really miss it.”
We chatted to one of our volunteers, Karen Dumper, Director of IT and Innovation about the club. You can read this here.