How volunteers ease anxiety

Five months after the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, I was one of the 2,661 accredited writers who covered the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City.

I’ll never forget the thousands of volunteers who created an atmosphere of welcome, safety and joy at more than a dozen Olympic venues in Utah during a time of deep anxiety and uncertainty.

I wrote a story then about a large group of unrelated Olympic volunteers who launched a heartwarming show of giving when they found out that a poorly funded Eastern European hockey team was shopping for souvenirs at a dollar store.

A similar feeling about the impact of volunteers struck me on Tuesday while I spoke with some of the thousands who have joined ProjectProtect, which aims to make 5 million masks for frontline health care workers during the coronavirus pandemic.

Megan Bailey, a former emergency room nurse who now is an administrator at University of Utah Health, told me that her former colleagues in the ER are scared about working with COVID-19 patients. The fact that volunteers are providing them with personal protective equipment makes them feel safer, she said.

The project is a welcome addition to a workload that has only accelerated during the pandemic for the Relief Society general presidency of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

“We are so busy now, we are even having meetings in the evening,” Sister Reyna I. Aburto, the second counselor to President Jean B. Bingham, told me on Tuesday as we stood near the drive-thru at the Deseret Industries thrift store in American Fork, Utah.

Sister Aburto spent more than an hour handing mask-making kits through car windows to volunteers for ProjectProtect, a monumental effort to mobilize 50,000 volunteers to sew 5 million medical-grade masks.

Many people are comparing the project’s volunteer mobilization to the 2002 Olympics. Olympic.org says 22,000 people volunteered during the Olympics that year. Utah.com reports the total was 32,000, broken down this way:

• 8,000 volunteers assisted at events in the year leading up to the Olympics.
• 18,000 core volunteers helped during the two weeks of the Olympics.
• 6,000 volunteered for the Paralympics held afterward.

There was overlap. Many people volunteered in two or all three of those categories.

The same will be true with ProjectProtect. Organizers need 10,000 volunteers a week for five weeks, and many seamsters and seamstresses will volunteer in multiple weeks.

But saying 10,000 volunteers are working on the masks this week would undercount how many people are involved.

For example, Nubia Thayer of Salem, Utah, registered as one of the volunteers for the first week of the project and received a kit to make 100 masks, but she isn’t alone in working on them. Her husband, Josh, and their friends, Carson Griffin and Steve Woolsey, have created a little assembly line at the Thayer home. She also plans to include a local young woman who wants to do some of the sewing.

So the actual number of volunteers for the first week easily could be two times the 10,000 who registered.

Deseret Industries, operated by the church’s welfare department, is closed during the pandemic, but ProjectProtect temporarily transformed the drive-thru on Tuesday from drop-off destination to pickup location.

“I wanted to see it myself, and I wanted to help,” Sister Aburto said in the story I published on Tuesday.

The Relief Society general presidency sent an email to local Relief Society presidents along Utah’s Wasatch Front on Thursday, asking them to help the volunteer mobilization.

Sister Aburto is aware that many Relief Society sisters and other church members in other parts of Utah, the United States and the world want to help. Stories are abundant of ward and branch Relief Societies organizing groups to make masks for caregivers or of individuals making them for neighbors.

“I’ve been making masks for friends and neighbors,” said Cassidi Mecham, a church member in American Fork. “I have a friend who was just diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and a friend who works at Chick-Fil-A.”

“Members are helping each other and helping others,” Sister Aburto said. “We are receiving reports from around the world. They are finding ways to minister to each other.”

As the volunteers drove out of the Deseret Industries parking lot on Tuesday, they passed a sign that said, “Thank you! You are saving lives.”

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