Many of you have reached out to see how you can help support our amazing heroes — our team of caregivers, nurses, dining, housekeeping and laundry staff and other essential workers.
We are so proud of this team for the loving care they provide and their efforts to go above and beyond to keep residents safe, feeling secure and in as good as spirits as possible during this time.
This crisis has added responsibilities, changes to processes and new equipment to assemble or learn to use. Each week there are new challenges and our team take them in stride!
At this time we call on your support to help implement new initiatives to help these heroes feel appreciated.
1). We are establishing a food pantry that all staff can access weekly enabling them to bring home a bag of non-perishable grocery items, cleaning supplies and toilet paper — if it ever becomes available again! With our team wearing many hats right now we need help getting this off the ground and are looking for a volunteer or volunteers to help spearhead this program (remotely). For those who would like to donate to the pantry we have a blue bin located outside our loading dock ready to accept donations. We just ask that they are dropped off before 4pm each day so we can bring them inside to our pantry before the evening. All groceries will be sanitized before being brought into the community. We hope you will consider shopping for our staff when you do your next grocery run or delivery!
2). We have established a meal train and are hoping that a couple of times a week staff can receive a fun lunch, dinner or late night meal. We would also love a remote volunteer to help coordinate this.
The meal train can be accessed here.
3). We continue to welcome your notes of encouragement or appreciation and will keep sharing those with all of our staff. We also love to give little thank you treats to our staff whenever possible and would love help with that if you are able. It can be as simple as a candy bar with a note tied to it or the little hand sanitizers we passed out to our whole team last week. We are trying to keep these little things going but we would love support if you have an idea or the time to help.
We know that some of you have in the past chosen to provide treats to specific departments. At this time we kindly ask you instead support the meal train or food pantry so that we can make sure that all our staff feel the love — including those behind the scenes. As a reminder our staff are not allowed to accept individual gifts or gratuities.
For more information about the meal train and the food pantry or to volunteer please e-mail sianstevens@caledoniaseniorliving.org. As always, you can make a donation on our website.
Thanks for all your support!