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ACTS OF KINDNESS By Nick Woolf and Audrie Krause
The Caring Community
At other times, volunteer opportunities were completely
at Congregation B’nai B’rith is a group of volunteers
unanticipated. For example, one woman was unable
who provide support to community members who
to visit her husband who was in a nursing home under
face short term difficulties of one kind or another.
lock down. We arranged for volunteers to call her, and
Prior to the pandemic, this assistance might include anything from driving members to temple, to delivering soup or cheer bags, accompanying them to doctor’s appointments, or preparing and delivering meals after a member returned home from surgery.
as a result, we learned one major cause of her distress was that her husband’s hearing aids had been misplaced and she couldn’t afford to replace them. CBB was able to help with this expense, ensuring the couple could speak regularly — first by phone, then through a window. This provided them both enormous comfort until he passed
In March 2020, however, our activities needed
away some months later. Meanwhile, volunteers are
to adapt overnight. We went from a small group of long-term volunteers serving a small handful of members to a large, wide-ranging operation with new volunteers, all eager to help a wide range of members impacted in one way or another. Indeed, over the past year and a half, the Caring Community has provided some 770 acts of service,
still checking in with the member to this day.
The primary mission of the Caring Community is to try and ensure that no one has acute unmet needs that our volunteers could fill.
reaching out to more than 130 members, with a volunteer pool of about 70.
An enormous project completed over the course of the pandemic were three rounds of calls to every member household, some 800 people each time. This helped us to identify members in need, though luckily most people seemed to be doing well. But others were isolated, and so a new program of “friendly callers” sprang up. This has become the service most supplied by volunteers—and in many
ways gets to the heart of our volunteer efforts.
And what were all of these volunteers doing?
What we learned from the calls is the tremendous
We had younger members buying groceries for elder
Community is to try to ensure that no one has acute
members, techie volunteers helping congregants
unmet needs that could be fulfilled by our volunteers.
connect to CBB by Zoom, and a series of check in
The new all-member calling campaigns have
calls to make sure that there were no isolated people with needs that no one was aware of.
value of connection. The primary mission of the Caring
demonstrated that all of our membership comprises one big Caring Community. Whether it’s the volunteers
In some cases, members were struggling to pay for
who make these calls, or the recipients, all have
groceries and other necessities. Due to the generosity of
universally reported how fulfilling and valuable it has
donors to a COVID-19 fund, we could provide pre-paid
been to make contact and connect with congregants
gift cards, so that our volunteer shoppers could
who may already be friends or acquaintances,
purchase and deliver what the members needed.
but more likely had previously never met.
24 | SHALOM SANTA BARBARA | 2021–2022
JEWISHSANTABARBARA.ORG
