Helping Hands
The Volunteer Center of Grant County celebrates the spirit of lending a hand on April 14.
Borrowing from Mahatma Gandhi, Volunteer Center director Alicia Edwards has crafted a bumper sticker that she hopes will put the peaceful activist's message into hands-on, roll-up-your-sleeves terms.
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Alicia Edwards has been at
the helm of the Volunteer Center of Grant County for roughly a year.
(Photo by Donna Clayton Lawder) |
"Gandhi said to be the change we want to see in the world. So our message is, 'Be the Change. . . Give your Time,'" she explains.
April is National Volunteer Month, and the Silver City-based Volunteer Center of Grant County is geared up to celebrate with a fair at the town's Gough Park on April 14. Co-sponsored by the CASA program, the outdoor event will provide plenty of the usual freebies—food, music and fun for the kids—along with information about local volunteer opportunities. Local bands Gypsy Feet and Your Sister Cheryl will donate their time and musical talents for the event.
"We'll have booths—we have more than a dozen groups signed up so far," Edwards says. "People can learn more about being a volunteer. Other organizations can hook up with the volunteer help they need to do whatever it is they do."
Raffle tickets for prize drawings will be sold as a fundraiser, and there will be children's activities, like face-painting and games.
Edwards, who has served as the center's director for a year now, goes from energetic promotion mode to pensive as she reflects on the wide-ranging facets of the Volunteer Center's work and programs. (See the February 2005 Desert Exposure for more details.)
The organization's Partners for Seniors program matches volunteers to local seniors. The volunteers help out with shopping, light housekeeping and transportation, offering companionship in the bargain. "The human connection is really the most valuable thing of all," Edwards says.
The Hermanas program assists and supports women recovering from substance abuse. Locally, methamphetamine is a real scourge, Edwards notes. The hermanas are volunteer mentors who share their own life experiences with the women struggling to break free of addiction and rebuild their lives in a healthy, addiction-free manner.
And Alimentos Para el Niño, "Food for the Child," is a backpack program that provides food for children to take home from school, so they don't go hungry on weekends. "There are so many children, right here in our schools, who are defined as homeless," Edwards says. "They don't have a place to go and they have no means of getting food, except for what they get while they are in school." (For more on local hunger issues, see the July 2005 Desert Exposure.)
In the Alimentos program, she explains, the food is given out in backpacks to normalize appearances, hoping to avoid students refusing the assistance due to fear of stigma from their peers. "You know, the kids all have backpacks these days, so doing it this way, putting the weekend food in a backpack, normalizes things a bit for them," she says.
Edwards goes through some surprising and somber statistics on teen homelessness, then in the next breath talks about the changes in and pride of contribution of the teen volunteers who fill the backpacks each week for their classmates.
"Oh, I love this job!" she exclaims. "It's true, I see a lot of sad things, but this is still positive work."
The Volunteer Center is a clearinghouse of sorts—giving training, matching volunteers with organizations, and making connections. Someone, usually a new transplant to the area, Edwards says, walks in the door and asks, "What can I do?" The Volunteer Center staff screen and evaluate the potential volunteer, offer basic training in things like answering the phone, filing, what-have-you, and then set up appointments with local agencies looking for volunteer help. The center has more than two-dozen agencies on its we-need-volunteers roster, Edwards says.
The Volunteer Center works with a number of groups and organizations to promote and disseminate information on volunteering. "Collaboration is definitely the direction I am taking the center in," Edwards says.
She describes a joint effort with Frank Kenney, director of the RSVP program for senior volunteers. "The call I get most often is from seniors who need help with transportation. They simply need help getting somewhere," Edwards says. So she got together with Kenney and Tom Ogas from the Corre Caminos bus company and wrote a grant to address this need.
"We got funding that then went to Corre Caminos," she says, "so they could add routes to help seniors get where they needed to get."
The center also has a "buddy program" in the school system, matching up fifth-graders with younger students. "They do a lot of this in the Aldo Leopold school," Edwards says, "because service and real-life learning is a lot of what they do there."
There are similar student-buddy programs in the other public schools, she says, and a strong program at Western New Mexico University, in the Social Sciences Department. "The self-reflection process is what's key," Edwards adds. "The university student has to think about what the volunteering relationship, the project, has meant to him or her." In the WNMU program, the student must have a certain number of hours of volunteer service to graduate.
"I'd like to see that become a requirement for graduation from high school," Edwards says. "This all really impacts community building. Just imagine the impact on us as a nation if every young person had some practical experience with helping others."
If you go: Volunteer Center Festival FREE |
The accomplishments of the Volunteer Center's programs—while tangible, positive and numerous—are just one aspect of volunteerism, Edwards says.
"I see this as a fundamental part of real community-building. We have such a middle-class idea of what volunteering is," she says. "There's so much more, so many ways to help. If you take a few minutes to jump-start your neighbor's car, you're volunteering. If you visit with someone you think is lonely, you are volunteering. Nobody's keeping score, but you've just given something of yourself to someone else, and you've made the world a better place."
—Donna Clayton Lawder