Helen Le, Madison House Program Director
Meals on Wheels has a new partnership with Madison House this year, organized by third-year UVA student Helen Le. Helen has always been passionate about promoting food security and wanted to ensure that Madison House had multiple programs to address the issue. She explains, “Everyone has the right to have reliable access to nutritious food. I don't think many people actually realize how rampant food insecurity is. In Charlottesville . . . it’s one in six people who don’t have reliable access. And it also disproportionately impacts marginalized communities, which is also an issue I am really passionate about.”
In fact, while 11% of families statewide in Virginia experience food insecurity, an even larger percentage of 17% families in Charlottesville are struggling, says Cultivate Charlottesville.org, a local service organization dedicated to alleviating this issue. The Meals on Wheels program strives to increase food security in the community by providing homebound individuals predictable access to healthy foods.
Madison House Meals on Wheels Volunteers
“Meals on Wheels provides hot, nutritious meals to people who have trouble accessing or preparing food. In addition to delivering lunch five days a week to over 275 residents of Charlottesville and Albemarle daily, we also provide a wellness check-in for isolated people who have trouble leaving their homes on a regular basis,” explains Robin Goldstein, the Executive Director of Meals on Wheels in the Charlottesville area.
Robin first became passionate about promoting food security after hearing about and knowing relatives who struggled with covering the most basic aspects of survival. “I understood, from a very young age, the difficulty of caring for people who have no one else to care for them – and the struggle that goes with not being able to access food,” says Robin.
Helen also has been long involved with food-related community service. Prior to establishing the partnership with Meals on Wheels, Helen coordinated volunteers as Madison House’s Program Director for the Blue Ridge Area Food Bank. However, COVID altered UVA student volunteers’ involvement in an unexpected way. She explains that with the pandemic, the Blue Ridge Area Food Bank received a lot of volunteer interest from community members, so Madison House volunteers were not needed to the same extent as prior to COVID. Helen looked for additional ways to support the community and subsequently developed the Meals on Wheels program connection with Madison House. Last semester, she partnered with the McIntire affiliated club, Enactus, to film training videos for Meals on Wheels. “Their training videos were really outdated, so we filmed new ones and edited them. We created flyers together,” she elaborates.
Additional student volunteers began their service in February 2023. Despite the program’s recent establishment at UVA, Helen already has a full roster of enthusiastic volunteers. Volunteers can choose between two roles: packing or driving. Packagers ensure that the food is properly sealed and stored in the correct coolers. The food, according to the Meals on Wheels volunteer guide, is prepared by Morrison’s, “a professional commercial catering company in the main kitchens at UVA.” If the students have a car, they can volunteer to drive one of the program’s 35 delivery routes. As drivers, Helen explains, “The idea is that we are also checking on their well-being. These are people that are homebound. They don’t get that much social interaction. We want to lift their spirits and be a source of camaraderie and friendship for them when we deliver their food.” The volunteer guide reiterates Helen’s emphasis on hospitality. “Friendly conversation is a hallmark of our service. You may be the only person they will see all day and your visit may be their primary social contact,” it reads.
Both Helen and Robin have valued their time as volunteers. “My time with Madison House— being program director of both programs—has connected me to leaders in the Charlottesville community who are really passionate about [food security]. It's great to see how invested people are into this,” explains Helen. Robin describes a memorable moment while working with Meals on Wheels, saying, “My favorite memory was seeing my own mother, who delivers meals on wheels, come into my office in tears. She had just visited a client who she hadn’t seen for quite some time, and the woman was so happy to see her. The client exclaimed, ‘Where have you been?! I have missed you!’ In those moments, it becomes crystal clear why we do what we do.” Clearly, Meals on Wheels is successful in establishing deep, interpersonal relationships between volunteers and the neighbors they serve.
On a national scale, Meals on Wheels has over 5,000 programs and more than two million volunteers. It empowers meal recipients to live healthy lives and benefit from friendly conversation and companionship.
Robin invites interested UVA students and Charlottesville community members to fundraising events this March. The public is welcome to attend a Magic: the Gathering card game tournament at The End Games on March 18, 2023, and a Dab for Good Bingo Night at Random Row on March 29, 2023. More details will be available on the Meals on Wheels website. Join in the fun and support Meals on Wheels!
Author: Cecilia Murphy