November 2019 – Newsletter

Hope you all had a wonderful Thanksgiving with your family and friends! As always, our EnE volunteers had another eventful month brimming with activities around giving, sharing, caring, and serving our community.

Beyond our usual activities, we had several volunteering opportunities focused on the holidays such as the Festival of Lights parade, Wreath making and the Toy Drive for Lucille Packard Children’s Hospital at Stanford. Our volunteers at EnE, together logged in 416 hours of volunteering this month!

A Few Important Announcements before we dive into our November activities:

• EnE’s New Year’s Eve Fundraiser: We are very excited to announce an EnE New Year’s Eve Fundraiser to support kids in bay area from low income families. As we head into the new year, we are counting on you to make this event a great success! Please see the flyer below for details. We appreciate http://www.puredesignsolution.com/ for supporting with marketing flyers.
• Music for Seniors: EnE is putting up a wonderful holiday music recital for our seniors. Seniors have given us great feedback on our previous recitals and look forward to our monthly performances. Each volunteer gets 2 hours of service time. The recital is on Dec. 21st followed by a holiday party for the music volunteers at Panera Bread on El Camino across Westmont Retirement Community. Please sign up at: https://www.signupgenius.com/go/4090948AFAE2AAAF49-music2
• Approval of Volunteer Hours for Seniors: In addition to Ayesha, the following can approve your volunteer hours for submission to schools and clubs: Cecilia (San Jose, close to EVHS), Kavitha (San Jose, close to EV Square), Pallabi (San Jose, Country Club), Namrita Grover (Cupertino), and Geeta Hiremath (Fremont).
• Amazon Shopping: Please use the following link to shop on Amazon.com: https://smile.amazon.com/ch/47-3656395. When you shop using this link, Amazon donates a portion of the purchase price to EnE. There is no cost at your end. Just shop!
• Continue to enter your volunteering hours in the following google form: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/14aCCBe74pU2ZQP2gdxXMGD3m0-8tKklzazClDQaB2rA/edit
• To learn more about hours required to earn PVSA awards in each age group, go to: https://www.presidentialserviceawards.gov/eligibility
• Congratulation to Preethi Nalluru for getting Volunteer of the month award.
• E&E launched new website. Please check it out. Soon you will be hearing about your accounts logins.
• Lastly, if you sign up, show up for your volunteering commitment. When you don’t, EnE looks bad. Surely you don’t want this to happen!

by: Tanisha Tol

Now for a Sneak Peek into Our November 2019 Activities:

Holiday Special Activities

• Toy Drive Lucille Packard Children’s Hospital (LPCH) Stanford: Volunteers have started collecting toys for the toy drive to support patients and their siblings at LPCH Stanford. It’s an ongoing activity till 13 Dec. Please consider participating! Sign up at: https://www.signupgenius.com/go/4090948AFAE2AAAF49-201918
• Festival of Lights Parade: Despite the gloomy wet and cold weather, our volunteer helped out by carrying banners and staging.
• Wreath Making: Activity for Friends of Heirloom Flowers Garden Club of Fremont: Our volunteers helped make greenery wreaths to be used during the holiday open house tours in December.
• Salvation Army Toy Barrel Prep & Giving Tree:  Our volunteers helped clean, sweep and dust the barrels, removed barrel wraps, labeled barrels by categories and even prepared the barrels for winter using liners.

Serving at Shelters

• Volunteer with Sunday Friends: Our volunteers helped with cooking and worked with younger children from low income families. They helped them with arts and crafts. Our volunteers also conducted hands-on science experiment for these children! It was a great success. Keep up the amazing work!
• Cook and serve at JW House:Once again our volunteers did a great job cooking an amazing dinner for families undergoing medical crisis.
• Cook and serve at Family Shelter in San Jose: Our volunteers cooked and served meals at this shelter.
• SV Mobile Pack:Our volunteers helped SV Mobile pack meals to feed hungry children and their families. SV Mobile Pack is planning over 200,000 meals.
• Meal Sponsorships to AshaJyothi, Shelter for Special Needs Kids:BIG thank you to Alpa Kohli, Krishna Chirala, Manju Tirumala, Mrudula Chodavarapu, Padma Mullapudi, Praveen Grover, Sahi Puvvala, Shivi Fotedar, Sunitha Anumolu, Vasu Madhav for sponsoring meals during November.
• AshaJyothi Meal Sponsorship:If you are interested in sponsoring a meal at AshaJyothi to feed ~70 abandoned special needs kids with autism, cerebral palsy, speech and hearing impairment, polio, down syndrome, please visit: https://www.signupgenius.com/go/4090948afae2aaaf49-20199. Available sponsorship options range from $200 for full day meals, $80 for lunch or dinner to $45 for just breakfast. Donate at https://empowerexcel.org/donate/ or mail the check or pay by cash.