Onsite Volunteers
The meal will take place at Edwards Church (297 Main St, Northampton). For your shift, please enter through the back door on State St. Please note that parking may be a little tricky. The closest lot is on Masonic Street across from Packards and behind Broadside Book Store (holiday parking is free!). If you park here, you can walk to the backdoor of Edwards through the alley that separates Kestrel from The Old Bookstore. We will have access to the St. Mary’s parking lot across from Edwards on State St., but we ask that you refrain from parking there as we are trying to reserve that lot as a place for our delivery drivers to pick up meals.
We will be checking the temperatures of our volunteers with a contactless temperature scanner and also asking a series of health screening questions before having anyone enter the building (have you felt ill?, been in contact with someone diagnosed with COVID?, etc.).
Once you are in the building, we ask that you wear your mask at all times and practice social distancing whenever possible. We are working to set up a meal packaging area that is spacious and allows for people to work collectively but safely. We have set up the shifts in stages, so ideally there won’t be an excess of volunteers in the building at any time. We also request that you wear closed toe shoes and long pants, as we will be working with hot food and we want everyone to be covered in case of splatters or spills.
We ask for your patience and cooperation with this, as our utmost priority is the safety and health of all of our volunteers, staff, and guests. Please contact Kim Carlino with any questions related to your volunteer shift – 413.695.3514
Delivery Drivers
The meal delivery will take place at Edwards Church (297 Main St, Northampton). Due to the amount of drivers and our priority to avoid any crowding or long lines, we have staggered the arrival of groups of drivers by 30 minute intervals.
We ask that you park across the street from the back door of Edwards Church in the St. Mary’s parking lot, which is the lot located on State St. across from Fly by Night. There will be signs pointing you in the right direction and then volunteer staff at the site directing you to where you need to go. There could be a line of cars down State Street. Please go to the back of the line and we will move things along as quickly as possible. We will get the meals and address cards together for you and bring them to your car. We ask for your patience, as we will be getting meals together for numerous locations at once and there may be a little bit of waiting as we try to make this as efficient as possible.
For everyone’s safety, we are working in a contactless delivery format. Each address card will have instructions for letting the recipient(s) know that their meal has arrived. We ask that you deliver the meal(s) to the person’s door and knock/call them once the meal has been placed and you are able to stand at least 6 ft away. Some cards may request that you call beforehand and then call again/knock once the meal has been placed. While we will be contactless in our deliveries, we also understand that you may be the only people that that recipient sees on the holiday. If you are comfortable, a wave or “Merry Christ mas and happy holidays” from a safe distance may be really meaningful to those who are alone on this holiday.
If after your first round of deliveries you would like to deliver more, please call/text Nora (contact info below) and we will let you know if we have any meals still needing to be delivered.
Please contact Nora with any questions related to your delivery volunteer shift nora@mannanorthampton.org or 608.432.8126