What Do Volunteers Do?
All of the assistance that CAN is able to do is completely dependent on volunteers from the Grove City Area.
The biggest challenge that CAN faces is mobilizing volunteers to assist in each situation.
Volunteering for the Christian Assistance Network is not a huge time commitment, but it is time dependent, meaning that volunteers will be called to respond quickly because people experiencing a crisis need help quickly. The assistance itself might not take very long.
For example, if a volunteer wants to become a caseworker, the volunteer will receive some initial training and will shadow or follow a more experienced case worker until they become more comfortable with the job. After this, the average case generally takes only 2-3 hours. Most of this is taken up by the initial interview with the client, followed by phone calls to the leadership of CAN and some follow up phone calls to the appropriate agencies or businesses (landlord, utilities provider, medical provider, etc.). Each individual caseworker may end up only working on one of these cases a month possibly even less.
In the case of volunteers like college students, who will be called up for more physically demanding jobs such as building a ramp for a disabled person, this may be only a once a month activity. During 2010, 79 hours were spent throughout the year on non-case work volunteering. This averages out to 1.5 hours a week for all volunteers.
While volunteering for CAN is a fairly low time commitment, because CAN is a crisis agency it means that volunteers need to be able to drop planned activities in some cases to assist those in need. Hopefully with a large pool of volunteers to choose from important prior time commitments should not be a problem. It is, however, necessary for volunteers to be ready to serve at a moment’s notice. This dynamic is one reason why CAN is trying to increase its pool of volunteers, so that volunteering will not always be a sacrifice but a blessing to both parties. The need is so great, help the Grove City School District today by volunteering. If you are not interested in volunteering but you would like to support our ministry, please consider donating.