volunteers

Food & Friends Needs Your Help

By Prince Of Petworth


Photo from PoPville Flickr user Sanjay Suchak

On Thursday, February 11th, Food & Friends needs 20 volunteers to deliver meals, especially those with 4-wheel-drive vehicles. Those without cars would be very much appreciated in the kitchen, and it would be great if they could come between 8 a.m. and 10 a.m. Volunteers may sign up to [email protected]. This information is also available on our website at www.foodandfriends.org/winterstorm2010. Without Food & Friends, our clients likely will not eat, so the help of the community is vital. Meals may be picked up from Food & Friends (219 Riggs Road, NE/Washington, DC) between 10 a.m. and 12 a.m., we will provide detailed delivery directions, and routes should take no more than 3 hours. For more information, prospective volunteers may call 202.841.5347.

Any Suggestions for MLK Day Volunteering?

By Prince Of Petworth

“Dear PoP,

I’m wondering if maybe you could ask your readers to send in potential projects for MLK Day of Service (unless you’re already collecting info). Most of the city has the day off, and a lot of projects I know are always set up for people to go and help out within their community. For instance, a few years back I volunteered @ Roosevelt doing cleanup, and spent a few hours with a ton of people cleaning out their field house. I’d love to see a good list of where I (and others) could donate some time on Monday.

Oh, and here’s 2 sites I found:
http://dc.about.com/gi/o.htm?zi=1/XJ&zTi=1&sdn=dc&cdn=citiestowns&tm=11&f=10&su=p554.12.336.ip_&tt=2&bt=0&bts=0&zu=http%3A//app.cncs.dc.gov/mlkday/viewprojects.asp

http://www.serve.gov/recruit.asp”

Here are some opportunities from Thanksgiving but if anyone has some MLK specific recs please leave in comments.

Dear PoP – Volunteer Opportunites for Christmas?

By Prince Of Petworth

“Dear PoP,

I am going to be spending the holiday in DC and I want to volunteer time on either Christmas eve or Christmas day. Do you know if Martha’s Table or other places need help either of those days? Something in or near CH or the metro would be great as I don’t have a car.”

We looked at some volunteer opportunities for Thanksgiving. That’s probably a good start. Info on volunteering at Martha’s Table can be found here. Does anyone know of some specific opportunities for volunteering over Christmas?

Interested in a PoP Blood Drive?

By Prince Of Petworth


Photo from PoPville flickr user rosiedawn

“Dear PoP,

I just go back from donating blood at Children’s hospital. They told me they need to organize blood drives for the 22nd, 23rd and 29th of December. If you can get 15-20 people to agree to donate blood, they can send a blood mobile out to a designated location and do a blood drive.

How about a PoP blood drive. I bet you have a lot of readers who are not leaving town. Might be cool to do in in conjunction with a local restaurant (Pete’s? CommonWealth?) at lunch time. It could also be a book or toy drive for Children’s.”

If I can get 20 people to commit I’ll happily coordinate. If you’d like to donat please mention which day (22, 23, or 29) works for you and where you’d like to have it set up.

Anyone Know of any Thanksgiving Volunteer Opportunities?

By Prince Of Petworth


Photo by PoPville Flickr user rosiedawn

“Dear PoP,

I was just wondering if you had heard about any volunteer opportunities in the neighborhood on Thanksgiving. I’ve gone through the lists of volunteer opportunities on Washington Post, Washingtonian, Idealist, ServeDC, etc. and all of them are completely booked up with volunteers and aren’t accepting any more people. It’s great that there’s such an outpouring of support this holiday season (and that organizations are only taking on the # of volunteers they can actually use), but I was just wondering if there weren’t some less well-publicized volunteer opps that could still use some helping hands (or cars) this Thanksgiving.

Any suggestions from you or readers would be appreciated!”

How To Volunteer at the Armed Forces Retirement Home

By Prince Of Petworth

On this Veteran’s Day some folks have asked me how they can volunteer at the Armed Forces Retirement Home.

I received the following info on how to do it:

“ Here is a link with all sorts of information on how to volunteer at the Home. Our volunteers find it a rewarding experience. Each resident has an amazing story to tell; 80 percent of the residents were career enlisted men or women. We have a group of absolutely amazing women who served in World War II who served overseas and can tell some amazing tales of the war years.”

Here is a story I wrote about Master Sergeant Gary Rice, a resident.

Thanks to all our Veterans on this day and all days.

Anyone Have A Pick Up Truck?

By Prince Of Petworth


photo by Peter

From an email:

“Bruce Monroe Elementary School has a garden that needs mulch. Takoma City has mulch that needs a garden. If you can help out your neighbors, please contact me today.

Nuri Heckler- Volunteer Outreach
Americorps VISTA
Greater D.C. Cares
202-777-4469 phone
[email protected]”

Help Build a Playground Thurs., Fri. and/or Sat.

By Prince Of Petworth

From an email:

A small Quaker preschool at DuPont Circle needs volunteers Thursday, Friday and Saturday for a PLAYGROUND BUILD! We are replacing a 20+ year old playground at School for Friends, and we could use your help.

A group called Learning Structures helped design the new playground, and will be down this week guiding the build. We need some skilled workers for Thursday and Friday, and anybody who can come to help out Saturday is welcome.

Please contact Roxana Geffen ([email protected]) if you can help! On Saturday, we need all skill levels for building, as well as help with child care and general logistics.

Skill levels:

1 I’m nice to be with
2 Basic drill-handling and hammering
3 I’ve built a deck and done a reasonable amount of carpentry
4 Skilled carpenter, worked professionally or equivalent

We also welcome donations of food, water, funds or tools (we can give you our tax id & receipt!).

School for Friends: http://www.schoolforfriends.org/

New Garden Project at Chavez Prep Charter School (Kenyon and Sherman Streets, NW)

By Prince Of Petworth

Photos taken by Johnny Casana.

I bumped into some folks (Dan, John, Christen, Johnny and Natty) installing gardening boxes at the newly renovated Cesar Chavez Charter School. I love bumping into projects like this.

One of the participants, John, sent me the following by email:

“This weekend, we installed five large raised beds and filled them with compost; we will be building roughly ten more once we secure funding, and we’ll be painting them all so they look nice. The garden will be an educational garden for the school, which is one of the Cezar Chavez Public Charter Schools for Public Policy.

There will be a community open house that will take place at the school on October 30th, and we hope to have a sign up by then and educate DC council members, other VIPs, teachers and parents about the concept. We (that is, the folks you saw, five of us who are volunteering our time as the Columbia Heights Garden Club) plan to work with school administrators and faculty over the winter to engage the students in the planning and planting for these spaces next spring. Eventually, we hope to assist with incorporating the garden into the curriculum, teaching young people about growing food, native plants, storm water runoff, and more. And we hope to engage the community along the way.”

Dear PoP – What are Some Good Volunteer Opportunities?

By Prince Of Petworth

“Dear PoP,

Like millions of others in this shitty economy, I’m unemployed and looking for work. There’s only so much cold-calling and resume sending one can do in a day though, and I was wondering if you and your readers could highlight volunteer opportunities in PoPville for those jobseekers among us bored out of our minds during the search?”

We’ve looked at volunteer opportunities in the forum section here. There are some good options out there. But the PoP forum is pretty dead. So if folks know of good places to volunteer please leave them in the comments section here and I can refer folks to this post in the future. And to the original reader who sent in the email – thanks for asking, I admire your decision to do this.

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