Meal A Day needs volunteers winter 2022
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The Meal-A-Day program is still in desperate need of weekly volunteer cooks and drivers for Wednesdays and Thursdays.
Volunteers begin at 7 a.m. until about 100:0 a.m. One shift of volunteers work from 7-8:30 to help assemble and cook casseroles and vegetables, and another shift works from 8:30 a.m. to 10 a.m. to package meals, cook desserts, and sanitize kitchen.
You do not have to be a professional– the program already has head cooks, and needs amateur cooks to help with mixing, stirring, chopping, and assembling the casseroles or vegetables for the day’s menu items and desserts for the next day.
“You don’t have to know how to cook – just be able to follow directions,” Phillips noted. “The head cooks know the recipes and can guide you in the steps to help them get the menu items cooked and assembled for the day’s meals.”
Many of the 150-160 seniors receiving daily meals desperately depend on Meal-A-Day.
Meal-A- Day depends on volunteers to provide this vital service. In a week, Meal-A-Day needs approximately 80 volunteer hours for preparing, cooking, and packaging meals and approximately 65 volunteer hours for delivering meals.
Unfortunately, many of the Meal-A-Day volunteers are aging, themselves. Therefore, they are continually in need of new cooks and drivers as volunteers need to retire from serving Meal-A- Day due to age or health.
In order to continue Meal-A-Day, we must have additional volunteers. Several of the volunteers are at the Senior Center 2 or 3 days a week to enable Meal-A-Day to continue on a Monday – Friday basis.
“We just can’t continue to ask this of our volunteers,” Phillips urged. “We are just too short handed at this point.”
Please come be a part of Meal-A-Day! It is a rewarding experience. You meet a lot of nice volunteers who love helping our community seniors. Meal-A-Day needs 3-4 hours of 1 day out of your week to enable us to continue to bless seniors with meals.
To volunteer, please call the Senior Center at 903-885-1661 and ask for Cecil or Tina or e-mail Meal-A-Day at mealaday75482@yahoo.com.
Contributed by Tina Phillips and Cecilia “Cecil” Toenniges. Photo by Karon Weatherman