On ACCFB’s Volunteer Team, we work hard to ensure that every volunteer who walks through our doors has a positive and memorable experience centered around welcoming, belonging, awareness, impact, and of course, community. Hi, I’m Yvonne Williams, the Visitor Experience Coordinator with the Volunteer Team at ACCFB. Let me share what a typical day for me looks like!
7:30am – Set Up
Our fabulous team of five typically arrives at the Community Engagement Center (CEC) around 7:30am to set up to receive volunteers for our 2 daily shifts that start at 8:30am and 12:30pm. I start by looking at the roster of volunteers we are expecting and thinking about how we want to organize them. Our volunteers are quite diverse and represent the Bay Area — we routinely see school/youth groups, corporate groups, faith-based groups, and special needs groups to list a few examples. We typically reserve workstations for the groups and do our best to match them to projects that will be a good fit for them.
7:45am – Meet with Operations Team
Next, we meet with the CEC operations team to understand what the needs and priorities are from our community partners and finalize how we want to organize the volunteers for these projects. On any given day, that could include sorting and bagging produce, categorizing food drive donations, or running our assembly line for boxed produce or bagged shelf-stable food.
8:10am – Lead Volunteers Arrive
20 minutes before the first shift starts, our lead volunteers start coming in to set up the floor. Our lead volunteers have a lot of institutional knowledge, with many of them having volunteered hundreds of hours with us. They are inspirational to our team because of the leadership, energy, joy, and help they share with our volunteers.
As a former lead volunteer, I volunteered alongside many of them before joining staff and am so appreciative of everything they have taught me and continue to teach me. Because they spend the most time in and amongst the volunteers, they are instrumental to ensuring the volunteer experience is a positive and productive one. Without them, our volunteer program could not be as successful as it is! We huddle with our leads and share with them who we are expecting, the projects that we will be running, and the overall flow for the shift.
8:30am – Welcome All Volunteers
Starting at 8:30, we welcome our regular and repeat volunteers into the warehouse, while our new volunteers go through orientation. In orientation, we share the Food Bank’s mission and vision and let volunteers know the immediate and positive impact that they will be having on our community and how their efforts contribute to ending food insecurity. Our new volunteers then make their way into the warehouse, get settled, wash their hands, and then our lead volunteers show them their assigned projects.
All Day – Building Community
Once all the volunteers have been set up, we spend some time catching up with our regular, repeat, and lead volunteers, and get to know the new faces. We try to learn as many names as we can, the story behind what inspires each person to volunteer with ACCFB, and what their lives are like, which often results in a lot of hugs, tears, and shared desserts.
End of Shift – Sharing Stories & Impact
At the end of each shift, we do a wrap up with the volunteers around our whiteboard where we shout out the groups that joined us, and share the impact they had by reporting out what we were able to accomplish in terms of pounds of food processed and the number of meals generated. We also use this time to make any special announcements, such as birthdays, announcing new lead volunteers or acknowledging specific volunteers or groups. If we have a school group, we might ask a student or two to share their experience with the group.
In a recent end of shift wrap, we celebrated a young volunteer who had been helping his mother with a virtual food drive since he was 3, but was unable to volunteer until this year when he turned 10! Stories like this continue to inspire me, and it’s a privilege to be able to work alongside volunteers that choose to do something positive for this community.
11:30am – Reset & Second Shift
After we wrap up the shift, the lead volunteers help us reset the floor to prepare for the next wave of volunteers coming at 12:30pm. They might also share any feedback on how a specific project went and any suggestions they might have to improve the process. Then we have lunch and come back and repeat the morning shift flow.
3:30pm – And That’s a Wrap!
At 3:30, we do a final Volunteer Team Fab Five huddle to share updates from our volunteers and the day, before doing a final reset for the next day.
If you’re looking to try out this volunteer experience for yourself, we’d love to have you! You can sign up for a shift on our volunteer calendar.
