SAN ANTONIO — The San Antonio Food Bank is asking for volunteers for mobile, mega distributions. They say volunteers are at an all-time low. Without help, the organizations says they may need to scale back or even cancel food distributions unless additional volunteers can be booked.
The Food Bank says they need at least 400 volunteers a week to support their distributions at Toyota Field, Trader’s Village. Currently, numbers are only around 100 a week for this week and the following weeks.
"Last week we had a distribution that we needed 30 volunteers and about 5 showed up and we ended up scrambling," Eric Cooper said via FaceTime.
Its a story the San Antonio Food Bank CEO hates to tell but as coronavirus cases rise, volunteer sign-ups drop, leaving Cooper on verge of having to make some difficult decisions.
"It's the future distributions that I think we're trying to understand. Will we have the capacity? Will we have the volunteers needed to do those distributions?" he questioned.
Not too far away, another non-profit organization is seeing the same struggles.
"Like many other organizations in town we have been running towards the fire," Vinsen Faris the CEO of Meals on Wheel San Antonio said.
"Many of our volunteer teams have been corporate teams," Faris added.
"Now some of the businesses have told their employees do not volunteer at this time because we don't want you to catch the virus so our volunteer groups are down."
Despite the decrease in help, the demand for Meals on Wheels Service has increased by 35% since the start of the pandemic, once again leaving another CEO left to make a tough choice.
"We're seeing clients two days a week now we want to continue that, should we have a major drop in volunteers, we'll have to go a one day a week delivery we do not want that at all," he said.
These are cutbacks neither group wants to make. They hope the next surge they see, is of volunteers.
For San Antonio Food Bank volunteer information, register here.
For Meals on Wheels volunteer information, register here.