Volunteer Spotlight: Survey Helpers

Each February, AFAC surveys our clients to ask how we are doing and to gather some general information about our client base. Among other things, this year’s survey asked if AFAC is meeting clients’ dietary or cultural needs, asked if clients feel welcome coming to AFAC, and asked if clients ever skip meals due to lack of food. The survey is always anonymous and optional, but we usually get a lot of feedback and suggestions on how to improve!

Currently, AFAC serves over 2,500 clients every week at 18 different distribution sites. During survey week, every site needed extra volunteers, and whenever possible these volunteers needed to have the language skills to conduct the survey in our clients’ native language. Each year, this is a monumental task, and each year our volunteers rise to the challenge! This month, we would like to thank our team of survey volunteers, data entry volunteers, and translators for making this year’s survey a success. Thanks to these volunteers, we were able to conduct surveys in English, Spanish, Arabic, Russian, Amharic, Korean, and Vietnamese.

We are not finished entering the survey data from this year, so we don’t yet know what the surveys will tell us. However, approximately 1,000 clients submitted surveys with us, and that is already a success! We are always open to feedback from clients and volunteers. We are also continually tweaking our distribution process to ensure that it serves the needs of our clients in a constantly changing world. Thanks to our survey volunteers, we can take a look at what things we might need to tweak in the coming year to make AFAC better serve our community. Thank you survey volunteers!