During the month of August the Volunteer Department ran a contest for users of our Shiftsmart Volunteer Mobile Delivery App. Every time a volunteer used the app to deliver meals for the day, their name got entered into a drawing for 2 round trip tickets donated by Southwest Airlines for anywhere in the Continental United States. Last week our Chairman of the Board, Todd Webster, drew a winner and it was a long term volunteer, Marilyn Ackmann. Marilynn was the group coordinator for the Atmos Energy group in Innercity for 10 years until she retired last year. Now she drives a route in Kennedale every Wednesday and fills in when needed. I stopped by the Kennedale site to ask her a few questions about the app and why she liked using it. She said the app is great because you can navigate to client’s houses without typing everything into the GPS and you can call clients without having to look up their numbers. She says it is a time saver, especially when she is substituting on routes that she is unfamiliar with. One more thing she said was that it was a great way to communicate between the driver and the Meals On Wheels staff, because you can put individual notes about clients in the app. I asked her where she was planning on traveling with her 2 tickets and she said she takes 2 trips every year, one to Destin, Florida, and one to Las Vegas, Nevada, so she will use the tickets for one of those trips! I asked if she had anything else to say about delivering meals and she said that she knows it’s a small thing to do but she is so grateful for the opportunity to deliver a healthy, nutritious meal to our clients and for them to be able to see at least one friendly face for the day; she loves doing it and says it’s not a lot of time but it is an important thing to do.
Article by Jennifer Flynn