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The article below was first published in the fall 2008 edition of the Friendship Trays newsletter.

My family gathered in Cullowhee this summer. The occasion was the graduation of my son Charles from Western Carolina University.

Charles, 25, has been a Friendship Trays volunteer for 23 years.

Yup. For 23 years.

When he was 2, I looked around for a volunteer activity that I could do with him. That led us to Friendship Trays.

Back then, Charles and I would do exactly what more than a thousand volunteers continue to do today:

We’d show up at Friendship Trays in late morning. The folks there would give us a route sheet, a bunch of packaged trays of food, and some cartons of milk or juice. We had two jobs:

The first was to get the right food to the right people. Some recipients were ill, and the trays of food were marked for the appropriate diets.

But the second and equally important job was simply to share a greeting with each person receiving food. Charles was really good at this, and you would be too.

Some of you may have parents who don’t get out much. Or perhaps they live alone. You know that they really enjoy seeing people. And you know that seeing people cheers them up and makes their life a little better.

So that’s what we do at Friendship Trays: We deliver nutritious food to people who cannot prepare their own food, and we bring them a warm greeting each time we visit.

Sounds simple enough. But pulling this off each weekday is what I like to think of as a little miracle.

Every weekday, with mostly volunteer labor and a shoestring budget, we feed about 750 people scattered all over Charlotte.

We cannot do it without about a hundred volunteers every day. If you’re not already a volunteer, I hope you’ll consider becoming one.

We don’t require that you have a 2-year-old in tow. You WILL need transportation, and about an hour and a half when you drive a route and about two hours when you help out in the kitchen.

Call Volunteer Coordinator Lani Lawrence at 704-333-9229 for details or click here to e-mail her about your interest.