As nonprofits rebuild critical volunteer base after COVID restrictions ease, more help is needed

This week, nonprofits celebrate those who make their missions possible — those who deliver food, provide companionship, help with handyman work, and any number of other boots-on-ground tasks or literal heavy lifting.

National Volunteer Week started Sunday, April 17, and continued through April 23.

Volunteers are valued perhaps more than ever after the COVID-19 pandemic’s public health restrictions severely affected the local volunteer pool.

“For years, we’ve had about 150 registered volunteers,” Sharing Ministries food bank Executive Director Oneda Doyal said on April 13. She spoke during a Montrose Forum featuring Sharing Ministries, Haven House Transitional Living Center, Shepherd’s Hand, and Lighthouse shelter. “(Starting in) April of 2020, we lost 80% of our volunteers due to COVID — they had to shelter in place,” Doyal explained that many of the volunteers were at greater risk of the virus because of their age or other conditions and that she did not mean 80% of her volunteers had succumbed to the virus.

Although the volunteers had to stay home, Sharing Ministries still had to operate.

“We’re a critical service provider for the community, so we still had to keep our doors open, but we saw there weren’t a lot of people coming in, because of the fear at that time,” Doyal said.

“There were a handful of people (volunteers) who came in every single day, even Saturdays, so we could continue to serve the community.”

At first, volunteers toted food to people’s cars. The ministry then launched a home-delivery program.

“Our problem was our volunteers were still sheltering in place. We had to hustle around and find volunteers willing to go out and distribute the food,” said Doyal.

The service was critical. Sharing Ministries doesn’t only serve individuals through its programs, but also distributes Food Bank of the Rockies food to 30 other nonprofits. Committed to reaching seniors and others, Sharing Ministries teamed up with All Points Transit and Region 10, plus started networking to get the food delivered.

Sharing Ministries was blessed to receive a semi-load of food through the efforts of Haven House and JustServe, a volunteer clearinghouse that matches would-be volunteers with service organizations. But with the nonprofit recipients closing their doors to Sharing Ministries, storage became a problem.

Doyal praised three men, all older adults themselves, who stepped up and built Sharing Ministries a new 1,500-square-foot storage garage.

“Our organizations throughout the year started opening up a little bit,” Doyal said, but the volunteer numbers lagged until 2021 when they began trickling back in as pandemic restrictions eased and vaccines became available. The organization has about 75 volunteers on board now.

But the need has been rising — along with factors like fuel costs. Doyal said that since this time last year, there’s been about a 10% increase in need of services, representing about 420 new families. One hundred of those families came in within the last two months.

Shepherd’s Hand’s volunteer pool as rebounded slightly, to about 87 from more than 100 that served prior to the pandemic.

“People weren’t going to stop eating because there was a pandemic,” Garey Martinez, founder of Shepherd’s Hand and board member for the Lighthouse seasonal shelter said.

Shepherd’s Hand adapted by serving meals from a trailer with a certified kitchen, first from the courtyard behind the Methodist Church and then, from the parking area at the Shepherd’s Hand Center, when Martinez acquired that building at 505 S. Second St.

Meals are now being prepared inside the building, where a certified kitchen has been completed.

The center serves a hot breakfast and lunch five days a week and would like to expand to seven days a week. The Shepherd’s Hand Center also operates a food pantry, arranged like a grocery store, where anyone who is hungry can “shop” for what is needed. As well, people can use shower, laundry, phone, and internet services; use a storage locker, or access the services of other agencies with satellite offices at the center.

Shepherd’s Hand is the collection site for rides to the overnight emergency shelter, the Lighthouse, which is typically open from November to April each year. The 30-bed Lighthouse dormitory usually keeps about 27 people a night out of the cold.

Martinez on Monday said he needs more volunteers in order to serve meals seven days a week. Although 87 volunteers may sound like a substantial number, it isn’t enough to accomplish everything Shepherd’s Hand needs to do, he said.

COVID cut into the volunteer base at Shepherd’s Hand, as many of its older volunteers were not comfortable with coming in during the height of restrictions. When restrictions such as county-level mask mandates eased, several remained uncomfortable — or their families did — so Martinez kept the mask requirements in place until earlier this month.

Shepherd’s Hand still conducts temperature checks and requires everyone who walks through the door to use hand sanitizer upon entry.

Plenty of volunteers appeared glad to be back at Shepherd’s Hand.

Karen Conrad and Patti Whitticom worked together in the kitchen, trading jokes on Monday. Whitticom, who has volunteered with Shepherd’s Hand for years, had encouraged her friend Conrad to sign up, which Conrad did in January.

Whitticom herself drew inspiration from a book that caused her to shift from another nonprofit to Shepherd’s Hand, back when it still operated out of the Mexican American Development Association building.

“I read a book everyone should read. It’s called ‘Breakfast at Sally’s.’ It’s about a homeless man and you get a whole other view. It’s a great book,” Whitticom said.

Haven House also took a hit in volunteers because of the pandemic, although things are improving.

“Through COVID, we lost our volunteers. They are starting to come back,” Haven House Executive Director Rose Verheul said at the April 13 Forum.

Haven House is a transitional housing program for families who stay up to 18 months while receiving services and support specific to their situation, with the goal of addressing what caused them to become homeless and preparing them for success on their own. More recently, Haven House launched an expanded early childhood education center and is working to build apartment units on-site that can serve as an extra step of support for those who complete the program but still need to save up for market-rate housing.

COVID hammered volunteer-reliant organizations, said Eva Vietch, director of Region 10’s Community Living Services. Vietch also sits on the board of directors for Sharing Ministries.

“COVID was awful for a lot of these organizations that depend on volunteers. Most volunteers are older adults. They just didn’t feel comfortable. When COVID happened, we (Sharing Ministries) lost about 85% of our volunteers. They’re coming back, but when something like that happens, it can cripple an organization,” Vietch said on April 14.

Region 10 headquarters a variety of services for economic development and older adults. About a year ago, its Retired Senior Volunteer Program (RSVP) teamed up with Shepherd’s Hand to deliver hot meals to seniors.

With several signed up through RSVP to deliver Shepherd’s Hand meals to seniors, Region 10 is expanding its reach to other areas in its multi-county service range.

The RSVP program can help nonprofits build their volunteer base back up and work with more organizations than just Shepherd’s Hand.

Volunteers need to be 55 and older and can choose from various “service stations” — nonprofits or governmental entities that need volunteers and that have a memorandum of understanding with Region 10 for the program. Region 10 recruits the volunteers for the service stations and, through RSVP, can keep track of volunteer hours for grant-reporting purposes, as well as offers mileage and meal reimbursement, limited benefits and supplemental liability insurance.

The RSVP is also flexible in that volunteers can switch to a different service station if they want to, or even give of their time at more than one.

The idea is to reduce barriers to volunteering, Vietch said: for example, people who already volunteer at a participating nonprofit and who qualify to be part of RSVP can sign up to perform the same tasks through the program and become eligible for its benefits.

“We really want this (RSVP) grant to have some serious community impact. We’ve been quite successful and we’re very proud of that,” she said.

“ … A lot of these nonprofits don’t have the bandwidth to do a good job of recruiting volunteers. It’s difficult. When you’re trying to run an operation, you only have so many hours in a day.”

Region 10, like the other nonprofits, still needs more volunteers for RSVP and other programs.

Volunteers for its Handy Helper program recently removed the wheelchair ramp of a user who had died and reinstalled it at another person’s home “in 90 minutes flat,” Vietch recounted.

“We were able to reuse a precious resource and it didn’t cost anything more than what we needed to pay for the ramp. Now we’ll have that ramp to use again when these people no longer need it,” she said.

Region 10 also recently added a Senior Companions program, through which RSVP volunteers can provide companionship to older adults in their homes, or a break to their permanent caregivers.

“We always need more volunteers because we’re constantly adding new stations and there are still lots of needs through the area,” Vietch said.

None of Haven House’s programs would be possible without a bigger buy-in from the community, Verheul said on April 13.

“We’re proud to have all the community behind us. Everything that happens, it happens because of all the people who are out there,” she said.

Vietch also expressed gratitude to those who support and those who serve. “We just want to thank everybody who volunteers their time for any organization, because really, it’s volunteers that make things happen. We can’t do what we do without volunteers,” she said.

“It’s priceless and so, so valuable to the organizations that are served and so impactful to the people we provide services for. … They’re pretty dang amazing.”

Katharhynn Heidelberg is the Montrose Daily Press assistant editor and senior writer. Follow her on Twitter, @kathMDP. Originally published in the Montrose Daily Press.