distributing shopping, medicines and hot meals in the Scottish Borders
This is Jamie McCubbin’s story of volunteering during Covid-19…
volunteering in the community
I volunteered to be a community resilience volunteer which was set up by the Scottish Borders Council (the local authority that oversees Innerleithen where I live) at the beginning of the Covid-19 outbreak.
Requests for assistance from service users came to a central co-ordinator at the Innerleithen Community Council and who allocated these requests to volunteers like me. Once the service user who had requested assistance had the volunteer’s name and contact details they tended to return to the same volunteer for future requests for help. The service users did this as it saved them having to go through the central co-ordinator again and once you they got to know the volunteer and saw they did a good job for them they felt they could trust them with future requests for assistance.
The assistance I provided covered things like delivering newspapers, food and medicines but also other tasks such as helping someone fix a lawnmower and tidying up a family member’s grave and placing flowers on it.
I was quite busy supporting these activities from March to early June but after that, requests fell away quite sharply although I still deliver daily newspapers for two families. This was mainly due to the relaxing of restrictions on movement and that those vulnerable service users who had been asked to shield themselves through staying at home by the Scottish Government were no longer required to do this.
But my story doesn’t end there! I was also a volunteer driver for The Food Foundation which delivers hot meals from a hub in Peebles. I delivered to those who needed them in Innerleithen.
We delivered around a dozen meals a day. Initially it was 5 days a week from Monday to Friday but that reduced to 4 days a week from Monday to Thursday.
I got involved as a result of an appeal for volunteers by the Chair of Innerleithen Community Council. I have been a lead volunteer which involved picking up the meals from Peebles and driving back to Innerleithen to distribute them at a central point to a team of volunteers who then delivered them. I also co-ordinated the team of volunteers to make sure they were given delivery slots which suited their schedule and passed this information on to the hub co-ordinator at the Food Foundation who pulled together the weekly rotas. In the event there were not enough volunteers to cover the delivery routes I delivered some of the meals myself.
I carried out this volunteering for two months from the beginning of August until the end of September. When we delivered them the meals most of them were left on the service users doorstep for collection after we had knocked on their door to let them know we were there, although in some cases we did enter the property to leave the meals for the service user inside if they were extremely vulnerable. When we did enter the property we made sure that all social distancing and hygiene protocols were followed.
I felt that as a volunteer I was able to help some of the most vulnerable individuals in our community in a positive and practical way, helping them get through what has turned out to be an unprecedented civil emergency, and making them feel that the community cared about their welfare.