Foundation Communities' (FC) Supper Clubs in Austin, Texas, provide a host of opportunities, says Meghan Hein, community building volunteer coordinator. The dinners, cooked by volunteer groups that range from churches to businesses to book clubs, help residents in FC's affordable housing get warm, healthy meals and stretch their food budgets. With residents and volunteers dining together, there's also a chance to meet other people, talk, and build relationships with the Austin community.
"Some of our residents in single adult housing may have dealt with isolation during former homelessness," Hein says, "or they may be new to the community and haven't gotten to know their neighbors."
The dinners give them a chance to be with others – and to bond with them. Volunteers "get to know the residents," Hein says. "Residents get to know them, and we see wonderful relationships grow out of that."
But when social distancing measures began in mid-March, FC had to think fast about how to continue getting food to residents and how to keep residents connected. That meant thinking about new programs. They also established an emergency assistance fund to help supplement rent, groceries, medical care and other basic expenses. A NeighborWorks crisis grant provided some of their first funding, says Julie Candoli, director of institutional giving. Hein says that Supper Club volunteers contributed to the fund.
The main focus of Supper Club volunteers has been on the food. Even before the stay-at-home order, they'd been on top of it, Hein says, thinking ahead about how to provide meals for residents while keeping everyone safe. They were given safe-food-handling instructions, and some continue to make meals while others purchase food from restaurants.
But how do you continue building community when people have to stay separated? "We can still provide the food," says Trey Buchanan, who has volunteered with Supper Clubs for the past eight years with his wife, Adrian. "But we can't replace the personal contact. That's the hard part."
To help maintain connections, Foundation Communities set up a network to connect volunteers with residents. Known as Care Calls, the program matches volunteers with residents who opt-in. The volunteers check on residents once a week and sometimes more.
"It's for residents who want to have a social call and talk about their day," Hein says. But the volunteers also help clarify local orders related to COVID-19, letting residents know it's still okay to go for a walk, for instance. And volunteers log their calls, alerting service team members if residents are having issues getting medication or if their stress levels are high. "It helps us because our resident services team can't check in with every person every single day," she says.
Eliana Brant, financial wellness volunteer coordinator, says that since the program's start, 92 volunteers have been matched with 139 residents. To date, they've engaged in 452 phone and text conversations. "We've received a ton of positive feedback from volunteers, expressing that it's been a really meaningful experience during these challenging times," Brant says.
One volunteer says the weekly call is a weekly highlight. Says another: "This is good for both of us." And still another: "This is working!"
Buchanan, who supports residents at Arbor Terrace, one of FC's 24 communities in Central and North Texas, says that he and others from St. David's Episcopal Church will also reach out to residents by including notes with the dinners they send in individually wrapped packages. "We really miss them," he says of the residents.
For the past eight years, once a month on Saturdays, Buchanan and his wife normally worked with a team of 20 volunteers from their church. "We miss them, too," says Buchanan, who arranged for a local catering company to send dinner to Arbor Terrace this month. Next month, he hopes they can prepare a meal themselves, even if they have to do it separately. Some of his favorites meals from the past have been soup night in February for the Super Bowl and a full Chinese dinner for Chinese New Year.
Hein says FC is also sending cards and notes to residents from volunteers when they package up deliveries from the food pantry. "We're asking the community to send simple notes – an affirmation or a poem or a note to brighten someone's day."
04/24/2020
