Volunteer Needs – August 2023

Home Delivery Drivers

Our home delivery program is seeking out volunteers to drive on Wednesday AND Friday. We need at least one for Wednesday and probably three for Friday. The timing for Wednesday is approximately 12:00-2:30 and Friday would be 10:00-12:30. This is a great volunteer opportunity for people who like to drive, can carry up to 25 pounds, and can be here MOST weeks. We understand travel, illness, and last minute emergencies may affect your schedule. If you’re not ready to make a weekly commitment, we would welcome you as a substitute driver. You’d be delivering pre-packed groceries to 3-5 clients in a relatively contiguous area (i.e. along Columbia Pike, a garden apartment complex in Ballston, or a few single family homes in 22207). Most of the clients are elderly, disabled, or cannot reliably get to AFAC (and don’t have someone who can pick up for them). For many of these clients, this is often their ONLY reliable resource.

Home Delivery Packers

Related to our home deliveries, we’re looking for someone who is strong, has attention to detail, and can be reliable help MOST weeks on THURSDAY afternoons. You would assist packing crates for our Friday home delivery program. We estimate this would take approximately 60-90 minutes, you would be working in our warehouse that does NOT have air conditioning (so we’d encourage water breaks and stepping away from the space periodically). You could arrive any time after 1:00 but we’d ask that you’d finish your work by 4:00.

Claridge House Check-in Sub

AFAC is looking for a substitute check-in volunteer at one of our food distribution sites, Claridge House. It is an elderly living facility in Pentagon City, Arlington which holds weekly food distribution on Mondays at 10:30-12:00. When there are Monday holidays, we push distribution to Tuesday mornings at the same time and need a check-in volunteer. We are looking for someone who can cover occasionally on Mondays and Tuesdays after Monday holidays.

Some of the check-in volunteer’s responsibilities include scanning the residents’ barcode cards and
recording any expiring or expired accounts for our Client Services Department. If you are interested,
you will be trained on everything you need to know by one of our Client Services Coordinators first and
then shadow our current check-in volunteer before trying it for yourself! We highly encourage any Amharic or Russian speakers for this! Though it is not necessary for the position, Amharic and Russian speakers make up a large demographic of our clients at this site so we encourage them to look into this!

Office Helpers

We are also recruiting for a volunteer to help with office tasks. For this position, we’d ask you to be comfortable with computers, stairs, cats (our director of staff morale can be very “hands on”), and be available most weeks. You’d be processing our volunteer applications, scanning forms, entering in volunteer hours into our computer program, and restocking our t-shirt supply. We envision this to be between 1-2 hours of work sometime between 1:00-4:00 any day except Fridays (you can pick which day works for you, but we’d ask it to be the same day most weeks).

If you are interested or have any questions about any of these opportunities, please email the Volunteer Department at volunteer@afac.org.