Going grocery shopping was never easy for people with compromised health, seniors or single parents with no one to look after their children while they’re out. Concerns about contracting COVID-19 has made it all the more challenging. Enter the Good Neighbour Project, a volunteer organization that was created as COVID-19 reached the pandemic stage and started to affect thousands of Canadians.
Its main purpose is to serve the most vulnerable in the GTA, the seniors, single parents and immuno-compromised individuals who are in need of essential items such as food, toilet paper, tissues, cleaning agents or medicine. The service connects them with volunteers, who are able to pick up and deliver the needed goods.
“I got involved because I was looking for a way to help those who were now unable to help themselves with daily necessities,” says Mary Beth Challoner, manager of events and marketing at the University of Toronto’s Varsity Blues. “I set up my own notice on Facebook and Instagram asking if there was anyone in need that I could help. Soon after, a friend of mine forwarded a link to the Good Neighbour Project and I saw that they had set up an online forum, helping others the way I had wanted to do.”
Challoner started off as a delivery person, picking up groceries and dropping them off at people’s homes. She was soon recruited to work the hotline and do the intakes for people calling in with requests.
“It’s truly been an enriching experience. The pure joy and huge sense of relief from those we help is amazing and overwhelming at times,” she says. “We’ve been able to provide basics necessities to members of the community who would have no other way to help themselves. We work virtually and are all relative strangers to each other and yet we’ve all come together to push through and help our neighbours when and where we can.”
But the work does not come without challenges, says Challoner, who describes the volume of calls and requests frightening at times.
“Sometimes the desperation and anxiety on the other end of the phone is a lot to hear and can be emotionally taxing. Being able to turn that around into support and hope is so rewarding,” she says.
Challoner is careful to point out that the service is not a foodbank, explaining that they don’t have a big donation processes of food or money.
“We just try to provide resources as best we can so that they can get to a foodbank. Once the people reaching out to us secure the order, we can set up the delivery,” she says.
Her message to anyone thinking of volunteering in times of COVID-19 is to “help where you can, it can really make a difference. And be kind to others, a little can go a long way.”