A New Day -- A New Way

Clowns in Action

Volunteer Award Winners in PACU

Volunteer Services Staff Meeting

Staff, Volunteers & Clowns

Volunteers playing games at Spring Fling

2012 promises to be the most exciting time in our 100 year history.  With the summer opening of the expansion building on our downtown campus, change will be the operative word.  Everything will be new to everyone, whether you have been here a few months or more than ten years.  Picture this...our downtown campus will encompass an additional million square feet of enclosed space.  That is bigger than 17 football fields!

For our volunteers, this massive space offers a unique opportunity.  We must be ready to greet our patients, families and guests and help them find their way around our expanded campus.  When we complete construction, it will flip the main hospital entrance from where it is now to 5th Avenue South.  The second floor of all our buildings becomes the main thoroughfare called Main Street.  The end result is the connection of all our buildings from 4th Avenue South to 7th Avenue South.  Our greeters/wayfinders will have the first access to the new areas as they train to help everyone find their way.

Most volunteer organizations only measure success in the number of hours volunteers give in a year.  At Children's we have an additional and more personal way of measuring your success!  Success at Children's of Alabama is measured in the difference volunteers make.  As a Children's volunteer, each time you leave you should feel that you have made a difference in the lives of our patients, their families and our guests.  Service is our measure of success; and no matter how you measure it, our volunteers consistently exceed the expectations of our patients, families and guests.

Some examples of successful volunteer service include:

• Giving a smile to everyone you see - you never know how important that may be.
• Stopping to take a few extra minutes to escort a family to their destination - they are stressed enough just to be here, how much worse is it when they are lost too?
• Playing Wii in the activity room - kids of all ages love it when you take the time to play.
• Staying with a child while the parent goes to get a meal, take a quick break or to check on the other children.
  • •  
      • Helping keep families informed during a surgical procedure - you can really ease someone's mind about their child with just a little information.
• Assisting professional staff so they can concentrate more on patient care.
• Extending common courtesy such as allowing our patients and guests to get on the elevator first - seriously this is HUGE.  They have appointments to keep, or a sick child to get back to.

Of course we do still keep a record of your volunteer hours, and we are enormously proud of the quantity of the hours that are served, but we do so much more than can be measured by a time clock.  Think of why you want to volunteer.  It really has very little to do with getting credit for time served...does it?  Come join the excitement, click on the information all volunteers should know link (upper left) to learn more about how to become a volunteer at Children's of Alabama.