Agency: Douglas County Visiting Nurses

Contact: Sarah Rooney at 843-3738 or sarahro@vna-ks.org

Douglas County Visiting Nurses is looking for hospice volunteers to facilitate canine companion visits two to four times per month at local nursing homes. Volunteers will visit hospice patients and other residents with Barney the Dog, who has his ‘Canine Good Citizen Award’ and enjoys the attention of patients in need of a furry companion. Volunteer visits would be approximately two hours each time, and the volunteer would need to be comfortable with animals, as well as working with seniors. A volunteer application/interview will be required, training will be provided with Barney before visits, and all new volunteers will shadow a current volunteer in the beginning. For more details, contact Sarah Rooney at 843-3738 or sarahro@vna-ks.org

Immediate needs

• Independence Inc. is looking for a volunteer “ghost writer” to assist a mental health consumer in writing a book on the subject of mental illness. This type of volunteer opportunity requires someone with good communication skills to talk about the topics and to transcribe them into written form, as well as good writing skills. The consumer already has ideas and notes to work from but is in need of help with organization and presentation. Ideally, a volunteer will be able to work with the consumer a couple of afternoons per week, three to four hours at most, but schedules are flexible. Volunteers with an interest in mental health issues are preferred. For more details, contact Stacey Hunter-Schwartz at 841-0333, ext. 104.

• Ballard Community Services is in need of intake volunteers for its Holiday Bureau. Volunteers will provide assistance with signing up families for holiday assistance and will be responsible for the following tasks: filling out a single sheet form and verifying Douglas County residency, making a scanned copy of the clients’ driver’s licenses and Social Security cards, and entering the collected data into an Excel spreadsheet. Volunteers are needed from 9 a.m. to noon and 1 p.m. to 3 p.m. Monday through Friday. Contact Doug Davison at 842-0729, ext. 102, or doug@ballardcenter.org.

• The Lawrence Art Guild Association 1109 Gallery is seeking volunteers to help staff the gallery during the holidays. The gallery is an all-volunteer nonprofit and supports all area artists, not just members. Help is also requested at the Holiday Art Fair on Dec. 3. Call 1109 Gallery at 856-2784 or leave a message for Linda Baranski at 785-887-6010.

• The Salvation Army is in need of volunteers to help support its Angel Tree Program. This program is a great way for a church, school or business to provide toys for children in need during the holiday season. Volunteers set up an Angel Tree in a high-traffic area at their church, school or business, and persons remove an angel from the tree and shop for the items on the angel and return it to the tree. The toys are picked up weekly through the holiday season and distributed to children in our community. For more details about this specific opportunity, contact Capt. Susan Dalberg at 843-4188.

— For more volunteer opportunities, contact Shannon Reid at the United Way’s Roger Hill Volunteer Center, at 785-865-5030 or volunteer@rhvc.org, or go to volunteerdouglascounty.org.