How to Find and Volunteer at a Soup Kitchen
How to Find and Volunteer at a Soup Kitchen
Looking to give back to your community? Volunteering at a soup kitchen is an impactful and important experience. 90% of soup kitchens rely on volunteers in order to function, so they need people from the community to be able to do what they do. There are many ways you can help: you can volunteer, donate food (bread is filling and gives you energy), host collections, or make peanut butter and jelly sandwiches as a to-go options for consumers. Always contact the volunteer coordinator if you’re interested in volunteering—there may be age restrictions or concerns. And of course, consider other ways you can give back to your community, like volunteering to be a tutor, adult educator, or clothing donor. Use these resources to find out how to volunteer and why you should!
Here, Wheels for Wishes has a great post clearly describing everything someone can do to help their community during the holiday season, a time that can be hard for those facing poverty or homelessness. They provide a full list of goods that benefit kitchens and pantries for those facing food insecurity, so if you can’t volunteer for any reason, you can still have a positive impact on your community during a time of year that should not be stressful for the effected. However, what they don’t acknowledge is that these people face hard times all year, and the soup kitchens need to stay open throughout other seasons to truly be able to benefit the community. They also take car donations, which they believe is important again, during holiday seasons, and when you donate a vehicle to Wheels for Wishes, your donation benefits local chapters of the Make-a-Wish Foundation.
This article will put things into perspective with statistics and inspire you to volunteer, while explaining explicitly how to. In a brief discussion of the Great Depression, this post describes how and why soup kitchens were founded in the first place. It’ll tell you how and why you should volunteer, specifying how to arrange it. Churches and government agencies typically can help you in locating a pantry or kitchen if you don’t know where a local one is. It might seem a little dated to think you can find your local soup kitchen in a phonebook, but if you can get your hands on one, I’m sure you can get access to that information there.
Trenton’s soup kitchen lists many on-site activities on their website that volunteers can aid in conducting. They take as many as twelve volunteers at a time, and they list their meal hours on their website where you can offer your time in one of nine throughout the week. They also offer an adult education program, along with a computer center, tutoring services, and they open their art room to children on weekdays when schools are closed. This is a great local place for residents of the area to give back to their community, and if your community does not offer a local place like this, you should consider petitioning to open one.
