Charities are struggling to find volunteers as coronavirus concerns keep people home.
Soup kitchens, food pantries, and animal shelters are losing many regular volunteers as people choose to stay home while the need for such organizations is growing during the pandemic, according to the Associated Press. The poor and the homeless are some of the most vulnerable populations during any crisis, and shelter animals still need time out of their cages and pens.
“This is a time when we do need everybody pulling together to help us out,” Second Harvest of Silicon Valley CEO Leslie Bacho said.
Feeding America, the nation’s largest organization of food banks, has seen a “sharp decline’ in the number of volunteers helping out, according to the group’s chief network officer Kathryn Strickland.
Sheila Williams runs the soup kitchen at St. Stephen Outreach in Brooklyn and says that her usual volunteer army of 25 members has fallen to just 10, while more and more people are coming through her doors looking for a meal.
“Folks that don’t normally come are coming,” Williams said. “They’ve lost their job, there’s nothing in the supermarket.”
The health crisis is having a growing impact on people’s emotional and physical health. Over the course of a week, the number of U.S. citizens reporting that their mental health had deteriorated because the pandemic jumped from 29% to 43%, according to a weekly Axios/Ipsos survey. The number of people who reported poorer physical health increased from 8% to 14%.
