Evaluating the Benefits of Volunteers

Just a little over 6 months ago, Met Council and the CUNY School of Public Health at Hunter College partnered to have students lead nutrition workshops for Met Council's low-income seniors in NYC. In just 4 months, 900 hours were completed at 5 housing sites in 3 boroughs, serving over 25 clients each week! We called these weekly nutrition lessons, "New Year You" in the hopes of helping clients improve their health as a New Year resolution. But in order to truly capture the impact of our volunteers on the lives of our clients, we had participants complete preliminary and final surveys anonymously.

What did we ask them? Well, we wanted to investigate our clients' behaviors  before and after learning some actionable nutrition knowledge. Here is just a sample of some of our questions:

1. When purchasing food, how often to you read the nutrition facts label? 
2. In a typical day, how many servings of fruit do you eat? (we asked the same of vegetables, whole grains, dairy, and sweets)
3. How often do you prepare and eat your meals at home?
4. How often do you get take-out meals or eat out?

In order to ensure accuracy, we kept the questions the same for before and after the the workshops and across all housing sites. So lets get to the positive results!*

• We saw improvement in a couple areas, most notably, more respondents always read the nutrition facts when purchasing food, if not often.  
• More respondents were eating servings of vegetables and whole grains as according to dietary guidelines. 
• They were also eating less servings of sweets as recommended by the guidelines!
• Lastly, we saw an increase in the percentage of respondents who were preparing and eating most, if not all, their meals at home. 
• This is beneficial because you can control the amount you eat as well as what goes into your food such as less fat, more veggies, etc

With this information, we can continue to better our workshops and ensure the effectiveness of our programming and our volunteers. Next year, we will target our clients' problem areas and further improve their health. All steps in combating hunger and poverty in NYC!

*20 total respondents- 10 preliminary and 10 final surveys were completed in their entirety. This survey is not quantitatively accurate or reliable acor, but purely anecdotal evidence. We aren't statisticians, nor are we trying to be.