Ten-year-old Emma Davis admitted she was a little worried about being bored during her brief admission to Akron Children’s Hospital.
But in one afternoon, she’d been visited by a pup with the Doggie Brigade, had a visit from a lady with a bag full of reading material, and decorated and baked cookies with a former home economics teacher right at her bedside.
You can thank volunteers for making hospital stays here a little more bearable for young patients and their families.
Over the next few months, the Akron Beacon Journal is taking the mystery out of what it means to be a volunteer by offering a step-by-step guide on how to get involved with a Summit County institution.
In previous stories, we explained what’s involved with volunteering at the International Institute of Akron, Junior Achievement, the Akron Zoo and the Akron-Canton Regional Foodbank.
Today: How to volunteer at Akron Children’s Hospital.
Each year, nearly 1,500 volunteers donate more than 120,000 hours of their time at the hospital’s Akron and Boardman campuses.
They range in age from teenagers to 100. Yes, they have a volunteer on the errand desk who recently hit the century mark.
“A lot of them had an experience here, maybe had a child or grandchild here, and they want to give back,” Volunteer Director Vicki Parisi said.
Signing up
To volunteer, I first signed up at www.akronchildrens.org/volunteers, where there are different forms for teens and adults.
The form asked that I be a nonsmoker who is able to communicate well in English and willing to purchase a $15 uniform, which turned out to be a blue smock with the hospital’s emblem.
I also was asked to commit to 100 hours over the next year, which averages to about two hours a week.
Regardless of which volunteer role I filled, the application asked that I give one three-hour shift to the annual Holiday Tree Festival, a nine-day event that takes 1,000 people to pull off. It raises a quarter of a million bucks for the hospital.
Volunteers also are asked to have had measles, mumps and rubella vaccinations; knowledge that they have had chicken pox or proof of a vaccine; and be willing to take a tuberculosis test and a flu shot, both of which are done at no charge.
Background checks are required, and volunteers also go through the same kind of orientation program that paid staff take so they can learn about hospital procedures and understand privacy laws.
Once all of that checks out, there is a wide variety of opportunities to choose from:
• Errand runners work for central supply, pharmacy or other departments that need items delivered throughout the hospital. I was told some folks pick this specifically because they want the workout of running around the three-building Akron campus.
• Volunteers welcome new patients by delivering Barkers — the hospital’s stuffed mascot dog — to each room. They are also the last person patients see as discharge volunteers wheel patients to their cars.
• The NICU and surgery desks are staffed by volunteers who check in visitors and hand out badges.
• There are a variety of carts that volunteers push from room to room: a cookie cart for baking treats bedside, a craft cart featuring projects for youngsters to assemble, a glamour cart for girls (nail polish, hair bows) and a character cart for boys (hats, fake tattoos), a good night cart with reading material and puzzles for the evening, and a teen cart with adult coloring books and more mature activities.
• A new position of “greeter” uses volunteers to escort family and patients around the building or help confused patrons find where they’ve parked their car.
• Some volunteers sit with patients when their families need a break. Those with at least six months of service can join a team that cuddles babies, especially those with medical needs for human contact. Others occupy toddlers and adolescents in the playroom.
There are also auxiliary groups that do things for the hospital: the Doggie Brigade made up of pet owners who bring “sloppy kisses” to patients; Friends of Akron Children’s Hospital who make hand puppets and organizing fundraisers; and a group of some 500 folks who call themselves Together with Important Goals and meet regularly to produce and deliver craft kits.
Parisi suggested a good starting point for me would be to team up with volunteer Nora Houser and make the rounds with the mobile cookie kitchen. I couldn’t have agreed more.
Showing up
Volunteers park in the Locust Parking Deck, where badges on lanyards give them free access. Then they make their way to the volunteer department on the third floor where they use a personal code to clock in and out on a central computer.
That’s also where I put my jacket and purse into a locker, donned a blue smock and met my partner for the day.
Houser retired six years ago from a career as a home economics teacher for Copley schools.
As Houser removed cookie baking supplies from a cabinet and refrigerator to fill her cart — cookie cutters, rolling pins, frozen cookie dough, flour, icing, sprinkles — she chatted about the motivation that has kept her doing this weekly for the past six years.
“Kids love to see me coming, and the nurses love the way the floor smells when I’m done,” she chuckled.
She also puts her home ec skills to use in other ways, like making scarves for the Doggie Brigade and embroidering blankets with the names of babies in NICU.
But this day, it’s all about those sugar cookies.
Houser maneuvered her cart to the nurses’ station on the sixth floor where a list has been prepared of children available to bake cookies.
She’ll typically visit six children in the four-hour shift she schedules herself.
Some may turn her away, she said.
“They might not feel good or they just might not want to,” she said.
But most react the way Bella Farmer did when Houser steered her cart into her room — with a smile and an eager nod.
Houser cleared Bella’s table, covered it with waxed paper, dusted it with flour, plopped some cookie dough on it and handed Bella a rolling pin.
The 9-year-old did her best rolling, cutting and decorating her cookies with one hand — the other arm was medically occupied — while she and Houser chatted about school and Bella’s brothers.
After the colorful treats spent four minutes in a convection oven, Bella and her parents had a plate of red and blue snowmen, pink hearts and yellow ducks.
“And this is for later tonight,” Houser said and she snapped the lid back on the leftover icing and left it with the cookies.
As Houser exited the room, she had to sidestep a Doggie Brigade member who was making the rounds with his pup, and Paula Kiel, who was going room to room reading books to younger patients.
She also left behind what she had promised: the scent of fresh-baked cookies spilling into the hallway.
Paula Schleis can be reached at 330-996-3741 or pschleis@thebeaconjournal.com. Follow her on Twitter at http://twitter.com/paulaschleis.