Give a Day, Get a Disney Day

When I first heard about this program, I got very excited because it combined two things I love very much – Habitat for Humanity/volunteering and Disney! You see I am a Disney fanatic myself – a DVC owner, a D23 inaugural member, a regular annual passholder and someone who has been to Walt Disney World over 20 times since childhood. So naturally I was thrilled to be able to combine part of my job with my Disney passion.

Here at Habitat for Humanity in Wisconsin, we don't build houses in the winter. It's just too cold! So normally we don't have a lot of volunteer activity happening in January, when this program began. However, the Disney program came during the perfect year for us. We had just bought an older building to house our offices the previous May and since we were very busy building houses that summer and fall, we put off remodeling our office until winter.

We had plenty of volunteer help from our group of regulars for the office remodel project, but I was concerned about how we would feed these volunteers. We have restaurants and local volunteers who typically make lunches for our construction volunteers during our building season, but many of them like to "take the winter off" from this expectation.

Also, I was hoping to find a volunteer opportunity for the Disney program that could involve families with children as young as age 6 (Disney's minimum age for the program). So I decided to see if we could get our volunteers fed through the Disney program. I submitted my volunteer opportunity on the Volunteer Opportunity Portal on the handsonnetwork.org website and it was immediately accepted. I titled it "Habitat meals … ideal for families." That title seemed to catch a lot of people's attention.

The very next day my volunteer opportunity was posted and the flood gates opened! It was a good thing I was not as busy as other times of the year when this program began because I was flooded with emails and calls from families wanting to sign up. Each week I was receiving approximately 20-30 contacts about this program. It was very popular!

It was fun connecting with new volunteers and getting them plugged in to helping Habitat for Humanity in this way. Basically I asked each family to commit to providing one meal for our office remodel volunteers. They had to work as a family to plan the meal, shop for the items, cook and bake to prepare the meal and then deliver it to our Habitat office and serve it to our construction volunteers. I also offered a few other opportunities for adults, like warehouse work. A co-worker of mine at our Habitat ReStore (a retail store associated with Habitat for Humanity) also joined in on this program and she was able to offer meal needs too as well as many other needs at the store, like cashiers, warehouse work and generally helping to keep the ReStore running.

In addition to numerous families who volunteered with us, I had two sports teams that signed up to help us out. One was a softball team from a local university that spent a day doing a special project at our Habitat ReStore. The other was a volleyball team whose members are going to Disney in June for a competition. They split up their large group and helped do two things for us. They fed a group dinner for a training session we were providing to our newly found Speaker's Bureau volunteers. They also fed and ran the children's area for us with approximately 40 kids in attendance at our annual recognition event for our other volunteers.