We Treasure our Volunteers

Each year we host a Volunteer Appreciation lunch for the volunteers who serve in our retirement community. We look towards making this a memorable event that shows the volunteers just how valuable they are to us. I have shared a few other volunteer appreciation ideas with you over the years and you can still find them on the A-Z Ideas page.

This year our theme was "We Treasure Our Volunteers." We used a pirate theme for this event and it was a lot of fun for us and or the residents. We started with our decorations. I found a lot of what we used on Amazon. For the centerpieces, we used a small pirates chest with beads coming out of it. At first we thought that these were too small, but they really were just right.

Next, we used a chest that I had in storage as our focal point on our gift table. You can see it in the picture. I've looked on Amazon and found something similar if you need a chest for this or another upcoming event.

Our gifts were wine totes... but don't tell the residents in my community that! I called them loot bags and suggested that they use them to take a magazine to the doctor's office, or to bring individual bottles of water with them when they go out. Our community is just now transitioning into a BYOB community and there are a few residents who really are against it, so I was trying to avoid the "walk on the plank" by those people. Everyone really did know what the item was intended for.

We filled each bag with filler at the bottom and then individually wrapped candy at the top. This was really just done for presentation, since the gift was the bag itself.  You can see from the picture that we filled the table with the chest full of bags in the center and the balance of the gifts on the sides. We used "jewels and coins" to complete the scene.

I wish we had this pirate scene setter in the room. We did have something smaller on the podium to complete the look in the room.

Our "sister-community" also did the pirate theme, but she did hers a bit differently. Instead of giving each volunteer a token gift, she arranged for really nice raffle prizes to be awarded.