“La Caixa” Volunteers Association, Iberdrola Volunteers, Telefónica Volunteers, Prosegur, Pernod Ricard Winemakers and Enagás have already joined the online corporate volunteering initiative together with FDI Foundation that we announced last week with the aim of fighting loneliness of elderly people admitted in residencies and isolated due to the coronavirus crisis. Among the six companies they have managed to mobilize more than a thousand of volunteer employees.
This project seeks to generate virtual friendships between volunteers and older people to mitigate the isolation that one of the most vulnerable groups in this health crisis is suffering. Volunteer employees will write a first letter, preferably by hand and in large print, to facilitate reading. Then “they will scan it and we will send it digitally to the residence hall, so that its staff can distribute the letters to their users and help them draft a response,” explains Juan Ángel Poyatos, director of Voluntariado y Estrategia.
The letters will include anecdotes, tales and stories, as well as photographs or drawings. Thanks to this virtual correspondence and the warmth transmitted by the volunteers, our elders will be able to calm their spirits and have a good time.
In Spain there are more than 9 million older people, who have become the most vulnerable group to the COVID-19 virus. Due to the confinement by the decree of the alarm state on March the 14th, some people are quarantined in their homes and others in residencies that do not allow visits. Accompanying them, even from a distance, is now more important than ever.
