Volunteering for an Eats on Feets chapter
Volunteering for an Eats on Feets chapter is a wonderful and rewarding opportunity to support families and their babies. It also offers an opportunity to connect with the midwives, doulas, lactation consultants, nurses, and other professionals in your area to help spread the word about safe milksharing.
What do volunteers do?
Volunteers work in teams to maintain and foster their local Eats on Feets community spaces. We have guidelines in place that support safe and informed milksharing and we monitor our spaces so they stay within these parameters.
Volunteers also regularly share information to inform our community members about safe milksharing practices or to remind them to check their freezers for example.
Some volunteers are moderators of their Community Group, while others manage their local Page. Some do both. Some take multiple Pages under their wing, some support and guide multiple teams of volunteers, and some answer media inquiries. There is much room for growth and fulfilment!
Volunteering for Eats on Feets also means working as a team and being comfortable communicating with each other. Our volunteers form a community as well and we work together in various spaces to be creative, collaborative, and effective. Clear and direct communication is extremely important to us.
Local connections
It is wonderful if an Eats on Feets volunteer is in the position of networking with local parents and perinatal professionals, is tied into their local community, and is able to make real life connections to spread the word about safe milksharing. Eats on Feets operates locally and Chapters are typically run by local volunteers. Knowing or getting to know likeminded people allows for the network to grow and flourish which means that more babies will obtain human milk. We have many resources available for this purpose!
Access and safety
Something to remember is to let the families work things out themselves. The community belongs to them. You may never know who is getting whose milk. Eats on Feets does not keep lists nor tries to organize and connect donors and recipients. Less is more. Families are responsible for matching themselves up as well as for their milksharing outcomes.
For questions about safe milksharing, please refer to our Resource for the Informed Sharing of Human Milk which contains the available safety information that offers parents, caretakers, and professionals the tools to make informed decisions about milksharing.
Thank you for your interest!
If you would like to volunteer for the Eats on Feets community in your area, message your local chapter or email us so we can send you an application!