Who We Are

• The Faith in Action Caregivers of Lower Bucks is an initiative of The Ivins House Resource and Referral Center
• Its mission is to engage the compassion and volunteer resources of the community to help elderly and disabled residents remain independent and in their own homes or apartments.
• It is an ecumenical program which draws heavily on volunteers from a coalition of religious, social service and other organizations.

How The Program Works

• Teams of volunteers are created from the supporting organizations
• Each team is called upon to serve only one week out of every five or six.
• During that week, individual team members are asked to make one to three recipient contacts
• If a particular assignment is not convenient for the volunteer, another team member will be asked

Types of Volunteer Services

• Transportation to medical appointments
• Companionship visits
• Respite care
• Meal preparation or delivery
• Phone calls to check on well being
• Shopping
• Minor household chores
• Referral to other services

Benefits to a community in supporting the Faith in Action program include:

• An effective in-home benefit and ministry to community and congregational members
• Connection with other faith communities in working together to meet local needs
• Connection of clergy/faith leaders with the ever-changing needs of the community and congregations
• Connection of congregations with non-members who live in the community
• Connection of people within congregations as they work together to meet needs
• Assistance and support of clergy/faith leaders by the volunteers
• Meaningful volunteer opportunities through training and hands-on experiences
• Congregational volunteers are covered by Faith in Action liability insurance
• On-going training for congregational volunteers
• Consistency in record keeping of volunteer hours and services
• Access to and knowledge of Faith in Action’s continuum of caregiver resources
• Assistance in Faith in Action’s program promotion within congregations

Please help us to help the children and senior citizens in our community.

We need your financial support to continue this vital service. Please consider making a tax free donation to The Ivins Resource Center by clicking on the "Donate" button on the left. Thank you

The basic notion of helping a neighbor in need is deeply rooted in the world's major faiths. Giving of oneself is widely recognized as a path to spiritual fulfillment and has been espoused and practiced throughout the ages. Indeed, most religious congregations in America today offer at least some opportunities for members to volunteer their time in the service of others. Given that some two-thirds of all adult Americans belong to a religious congregation, this represents a vast potential resource to support and supplement the care giving that families and friends currently provide to people who need chronic care.

Interfaith volunteer care giving, the concept behind Faith in Action, is a way to tap the religious spirit of many Americans and also to organize, channel and support volunteer efforts on a larger scale. Rather than each congregation trying to develop and sustain its own volunteer effort to help the chronically ill and the disabled, a group of congregations representing the community's various faiths comes together, hires a paid director and establishes a single caregiving program that draws its volunteers largely from the participating congregations to serve the entire community.

By banding together in this way, the congregations are able to create a program large enough to justify hiring a paid director and, together with other organizations and individuals in the community, the thought is that they should eventually be able to share the cost of that position and sustain it over time. Having a paid director who is responsible for the program in turn makes it possible to have a better-organized, more structured program that is more attractive to volunteers, who otherwise might not have come forward or, if they had, might not have been adequately utilized. Furthermore, to maintain the program's interfaith character, religious proselytizing by the volunteers is not permitted – and this tends to make their services more acceptable to those in need of care.

The preceding is from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the originator and initial funder of the Faith in Action program that is in place at over 1000 locations in the country.

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