Volunteer Alexandria

Spread Kindness and Serve Your Community

BY COURTNEY MCELLEN & MARION BRUNKEN

Let 2021 be the year of kindness and recovery. One easy way to spread kindness to others and throughout your community is by volunteering! Volunteering is providing time and skills to benefit other people and causes rather than for personal financial gain. If you have some time, please consider volunteering to help a family or an individual.

Volunteering can take many forms and be adapted to your availability, efforts, and abilities. Distributing food or gift cards, providing legal assistance, working in a daycare, teaching ESL or computer skills, and giving vaccine shots are just some of the ways you can help others in our community during this pandemic.

Many of the nonprofits we work with have resumed programming and are recruiting volunteers to assist with (mostly virtual) implementation. We need people of all backgrounds, gender, religions, and skillsets.

Volunteer Alexandria lists opportunities that include • sharing information with youth about substance abuse, • helping autistic adults refine their resumes and prepare for job interviews, • coaching others, • cleaning parks, • writing words of encouragement to first responders and health care workers, • producing podcasts.

Do you have experience in finance, managing budgets, or carpentry? Many nonprofits are seeking skilled volunteers from a variety of backgrounds to help achieve their missions.

Although the pandemic has changed how we interact with one another, there are still ways you can get involved. For example, Brad and Finn Harman shovel snow for seniors. Ans sewed masks for the community, and learned a new skill by doing so. The Cockerham family decorated envelopes for a holiday sharing program. Margaret Powell collects masks to distribute to the community, thereby ensuring that people who need them stay safe. She also crocheted 30 scarves to give to others. “I am honored to have the means to help people in need,” Margaret said.

As we work to ensure that our programming is safe during the pandemic, we continue to serve our community. Visit www.VolunteerAlexandria. org for volunteer opportunities for you and your family, to learn how to get involved, and to donate.

Above: The Cockerham Family

At left: Brad and Finn Harman At right: Margaret Powell Below right: Volunteer Ans

ing 50 shades of fuchsia complemented by crimson and umber.

Curator Nancy Galib’s photography zooms into a glacial expanse for “Eye of the Abyss,” a metaphor for coming winter hardships and the unknowns of COVSTROKE SMART CONTINUED FROM PAGE 15 sual language. The physical forms of the materials—posters, wallet cards, and fridge magnets—ensure maximum and sustained public exposure.

Alan has partnered with organizations across the city, including Alexandria Police and Sheriff Departments, the VA Department of Health, and Alexandria City Public Schools, to spread knowledge of how to spot and stop a stroke. “There has been a lot of appreciation in response to Stroke Smart,” explains Alan. “The police force is excited, and students are going home and teaching their families all they have learned.”

In three years, Stroke Smart Alexandria has achieved several significant milestones. The success has encouraged Alan to expand the campaign, turning Stroke Smart Alexandria into Stroke Smart Virginia. Alan is partnering with the Virginia Stroke System Task Force to work with hospital stroke coordinators and primary care physicians to educate the public in Virginia counties and cities.

He is also looking for opportunities to collaborate with public health researchers to publish on the Stroke

Photo: Kelly MacConomy Above: “COVID Nighthawks” an homage to Edward Hopper’s iconic 1942 painting “Nighthawks.” At left: Best in Show in the “Hidden World” exhibit, “Bubble Up” by Mary Elizabeth Gosselink.

February 5-27, was inspired by the collective experience of separation engendered by stay-at-home/ safer-at-home life in the time of COVID-19. Smart initiative and gain visibility for the campaign. It is often said that if you want to enact change, you should think globally, act locally. Alan embodies that. Born from pure intentions, Stroke Smart started here and is spreading outward to other locations. “If America would get this,” says Alan, “think of the lives we could save, and have already saved. This small act can make a big difference.” If you want to help make Photo: Mary Elizabeth Gosselink Hopper’s iconic ID-19, and then out into the 1942 painting, unknown with “Is Anybody “Nighthawks,” depicts the Out There,” an image on solitude of a few people in a metal of a comet streaming late-night diner during waracross a blackened night sky. time New York.

After Edward Hopper: Hopper is famous for such Themes of Solitude and Iso- eloquent urban scenes as well lation, at Del Ray Artisans as deftly painted depictions of the vast, sweeping Cape Cod coastline. Coming on the heels of the Phillip’s Collection’s “Hopper in Paris” exhibit, this upcoming DRA show has garnered a lot of interest, even from the Hopper House Museum in New York.

Full disclosure: As The Zebra’s arts editor and columnist, I curated the DRA Hopper show. My photographic work channels Edward Hopper’s style, and I traveled to Cape Cod to follow in his footsteps for this exhibit. But the art displayed reflects the individual artists’ experiences during a year living with COVID isolation, constraints, and protocols.

Some artwork is a creative and thoughtful Hopper homage on living in a pandemic world. Digital artist Gordon Frank created a satirical reimagining of “Nighthawks.” “Homage Bar” depicts an altered state of pandemic reclusiveness. Humanity has been extracted from social intercourse as the living become stilted, wooden recreations of their former selves. Yet the dog gets walked. Life goes on.

The March show “Give Me Shelter,” March 5-27, is curated by Theresa Kulstad and Pamela Day. Throughout COVID, we have all taken shelter from the virus, from our families, from each other. Forty million renters in the U.S. are at risk of losing their homes due to the catastrophic economic fallout from the COVID crisis.

This exhibit examines the struggles of living in the 21st Century without the security of shelter coupled with the devastations of COVID-19. Aspects of the show benefit the Carpenter’s Shelter in Alexandria. Look for donation boxes for items on the shelter wish list in the gallery. Monetary donations and Target gift cards are always welcome too. Go to www.carpenterssheleter.org/give/ for the donation wish list.

Del Ray Artisans is a 501(c) (3) nonprofit art gallery located at 2704 Mount Vernon Avenue in Alexandria. Hours at this time are Thursday and Friday 12-6 pm and Saturday 12-4 pm. The gallery requires masks to be worn by staff and guests at all times. DRA maintains strict social distancing and employs all COVID-19 ALX Promise protocols for patrons’ health and safety. Only ten people are permitted inside the gallery at one time. For more information, go to the website at www.delrayartisans.org or

phone 703-838-4827.

In 2017, Mayor Silberberg declared Alexandria a Stroke Smart City. that difference, contact Alan at alan@kwikpoint.com to learn about becoming a champion of the Stroke Smart campaign. And look for Stroke Smart materials on all the red Zebra newspaper boxes in Old Town Alexandria.

Below: Stroke Smart materials come in a variety of sizes and can be found across Alexandria.

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To solve the Sudoku puzzle, each row, column and box must contain the numbers 1 to 9.