Gratitude, Love, and Enormous Appreciation for Our Dedicated Volunteers

Dear Community,

It is with great admiration and appreciation that we celebrate our extraordinary volunteers and National Volunteer Week this week! God’s Love We Deliver is powered by the hands and hearts of thousands of individuals each year who give their time, energy, talent, and love to help us accomplish our life-saving work.

Volunteerism has been at the heart of God’s Love since our beginning in 1985. Our first volunteer – our founder, Ganga Stone – delivered a meal to a man dying of AIDS. After Ganga’s efforts came those of so many others: those who delivered meals from donor restaurants, and then those who first cooked in our tiny church kitchen on the Upper West Side, and then countless others who helped God’s Love nourish and grow.

In the nearly 40 years since our founding, we have had the honor of working with hundreds of thousands of volunteers from all walks of life who help us in every department, onboarding clients, supporting their nutrition needs, and cooking, packaging, and delivering the meals our clients and their families so urgently need. We cannot thank you all enough.

With this immeasurable gratitude, we are launching our Year of Gratitude Activities we celebrate National Volunteer Week. You’ll see our new gratitude logo everywhere and hear lots more about our plan in other updates.

This week, walk along Sixth Avenue, and you will see our windows filled with the names of our volunteers. Walk into the Volunteer Lounge and you will see these names on our wall (take a photo and share on social media!). Everywhere you look, there will be thank you messages around the building and staff who will say thank you. We will have special treats and will share thank you shoutouts on social media all week long. I invite you to visit glwd.org/yearofgratitude to read our list of volunteers and participate in the Year of Gratitude.

The effort our volunteers contribute is integral to our ability to nourish our neighbors, and it all really adds up! This past year, our volunteers donated nearly 87,000 hours of service. That is truly remarkable.

Together with our staff, our volunteers helped us accomplish the below, and so much more:

• Nourished nearly 10,000 individuals – clients, their children, and their senior caregivers – affected by life-altering illness.
• Cooked and delivered more than 2.6 million meals
• Launched a meal program for veterans with PTSD and a first-of-its-kind program in NYC for pregnant people with gestational diabetes
• Filled our new emergency response delivery shifts, making lunchtime deliveries by car in Queens, the Bronx, Brooklyn, and Manhattan
• Completed thousands of volunteer projects from regular weekly shifts to special holiday shifts, shelf-stable meal packout shifts, and more

This week we will also celebrate a significant milestone: the delivery of our 30 millionth meal. While we look forward to the celebration, we know we could only have reached this phenomenal achievement with the loving care, commitment, time, hearts and hands of our extraordinary volunteers. You make it happen!

On behalf of all of us at God’s Love We Deliver, but most especially the 10,000 New Yorkers we will serve this year, thank you.

With heartfelt gratitude,

Karen