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For years, AARP Foundation’s Annual Celebration of Service has raised awareness about senior poverty by engaging tens of thousands of volunteers on Washington D.C.’s National Mall to pack millions of meals for food insecure older adults. In 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic and rising food insecurity rates meant that vulnerable seniors needed support more than ever before.
Pivoting from the annual in-person Meal Pack event, HMS and AARP Foundation worked hand in hand to create a virtual portal where volunteers from across the nation could sign up to prepare and ship boxes of food from the comfort and safety of their own home. Volunteers received an empty box in the mail, filled the box with non-perishable food items from a recommended shopping list, and shipped their boxes to a food bank using easy-to-follow instructions and a prepaid shipping label.
After only a few weeks, 18,253 volunteers had participated from all 50 states. With nationwide coverage through social and digital media, the program accomplished its mission of educating and addressing food insecurity, while delivering 1,375,110 servings of food to the Capital Area Food Bank.
