2024 Winner - Albury Meals on Wheels

2024 Meals on Wheels NSW Innovation Awards

Albury Meals on Wheels Inc  Inclusive VolunteeringWith many of our older Volunteers retiring, we sought Corporate Volunteers and we were approached by several disability services that wanted their clients assist in delivering meals, so that their clients could feel they are doing a worthwhile service. We required to make the delivery sheets for the disability clients easy read, so that no matter what level of literacy – they could follow a sheet and assist in delivery (supervised by support workers)
 
Outcomes of the Project
We developed an easy read delivery sheet, we have both words and pictures, so the disability volunteers could go to each person’s home with the correct meal e.g.: soup, main only or Juice, sweets, main and other meal items. The outcome of this has been that we now have 6 Disability services volunteering up to 3 times a week and their participants consider the delivery their job, they take ownership and pride in each meal delivery, and this helps in the long term with confidence, future employment and overall mental health – as a rule they enjoy interactions with clients and have developed social connections