Through this platform, we identified various help and support services that can be provided to seniors during COVID-19 pandemic and beyond, including but not limited to:
- Familiarizing seniors with various means of virtual connection and social media platforms, their applications, and benefits.
- Helping seniors with installing and utilizing the social media platform(s) of their choice on their digital devices and providing them with technical support thorough phone or video calls or instructions via email or text messages.
- Staying in touch with seniors through regular phone/video calls, texts, voice/video messages, social media chats and information sharing.
- Organizing virtual group meetings and conversations with diverse topics and activities for our seniors and young volunteers to connect, interact, and share information, knowledge, and experience.
- Providing seniors with information, knowledge, and material on coping and resilience building strategies, which will help them adjust to the current isolative lifestyle and handle the consequent hardships, stress, negative feelings, and anxiety.
- Providing seniors who are seeking more advanced social and mental support with appropriate resources such as mental health referrals and relevant focus groups and meetings.
Our ultimate goal with running VPP is to provide virtual support and companionship for seniors in a safe, confidential and non-judgmental environment where they can share their feelings, concerns, and emotions, inspire one another to think positively about the new lifestyle we are all experiencing and get equipped with effective coping strategies to adapt/adjust to the world’s new social-distancing and isolative lifestyle.
This is also an extremely rewarding experience for our young volunteers who are put in virtual contact with our seniors; they benefit from the invaluable opportunity of interacting with our seniors who can share their own wealth of wisdom and knowledge and lifelong experience. VPP also gives our volunteers a great sense of impact, self-worth, usefulness, and engagement in this challenging time of social distancing and adjusting to our new routines and schedules.