Due to Covid-19, we’ve had to change our programming to reflect our needs. Fall 2020, we started bringing students back into the facility during the day if they were having a particularly difficult time in the virtual model. We are continuing to do this for the Spring semester by picking up students in the morning, giving them space and staff support to do their online school, providing breakfast, lunch, & snacks, and taking them home in the afternoons.
Food Services
With a hybrid virtual/in-person learning experience likely to happen over the next few weeks this semester, we are increasing the number of students who are doing their online school inside our facility during the day. This means we need help providing lunches! We are asking volunteers to provide food for 50 students Monday-Friday throughout this semester, you can sign up here.
We are also going to continue providing weekly meals for seniors. You can sign up to provide and help deliver lunch to our 25 seniors here.
After extended conversations with our families we have decided to transition from providing nightly dinners for kids to providing weekly grocery boxes for families. We will be distributing these boxes every Monday throughout the semester. This allows our families to have more say over what food items they are receiving and more flexibility in their schedules. This is a big undertaking for our organization so if you have a large group interested in getting involved in with our mission, this is a great opportunity to take advantage of. Please reach out if you are interested in coordinating grocery collection.
Tutoring Needs
Agape provides a supervised, safe haven for students to receive tutoring and homework assistance every day after school. All elementary and middle school after-school programming occurs at our facility at 2210 Marietta Blvd. Volunteer one hour of your time
We currently have several students who are doing their schooling inside Agape during the day who need additional support from tutors each day. This opportunity to help students is every Monday-Thursday from 2:00 pm- 4:00 pm. The needed support is mostly for help with staying on track with online assignments, ELA exercises, and math review.
While we normally allow folks to just show up and tutor once they have had their background check, we have strict safety guidelines we must follow in regards to how many people we can have in a classroom at one time. This means we need all interested tutors to sign up to tutor via our scheduling platform VolunteerHub.
We will continue to post more opportunities as we move through the semester. While we are hopeful students will return to school smoothly, there might be additional delays in the schedule and our tutoring needs might fluctuate as a result.
FOSTERING JOY
2020 was the year of adjusting and readjusting to a constantly changing landscape. We have changed virtually all our daily operations to ensure our families could remain as safe and stable as possible and fill every academic need from our students. We want to keep the momentum of our successes in these areas going in 2021.
But we also have a new year resolution to foster more joy. Our students miss seeing their peers, being able to run around in our gym, and using their hands to work through science projects in our STEAM room. So for 2021 we have set out to fight fatigue with more fun for our students and families!
We are calling on volunteers to get creative with us. Want to lead a small group of students with an enrichment project? Have a safe outdoor experience you want to help set up? Interested in being a surprise guest reader for a classroom? Want to be a pen-pal with a senior citizen? Please get in touch!
We look forward to having you at Agape!
For more information, please contact Christine Stuckey, Volunteer Manager at cstuckey@agapeatlanta.org
