Get Involved
As an all-volunteer organization, The Joy of Sox has no paid staff so the help of our community members is essential to our mission. There are many ways that you can help support our mission of providing joy to those experiencing homelessness by giving them new socks. Wherever you live, near or far, even if you only have a few hours a month, we would love to have your support!
Below are some of our activities that volunteers can do that really make a difference!
This may not sound like fun…, but it actually it’s a pretty nice event – and we serve food! And have music! Whenever we accumulate a lots of socks (several thousand), we need between 6 – 15 volunteers to spend a few hours to sort them (men’s socks, women’s socks and children’s socks) and count them. We then put the socks into our signature purple bags which are tie-wrapped and labeled. They are then put on the shelves for later distribution.
Whenever schools, companies, or churches conduct sock drives, they sometime request that we pick up the socks at their location. For this volunteer opportunity, we occasionally need volunteers to drive to the location where the sock drive was held to pick up the socks and bring them back to our warehouse for inventorying, sorting and bagging (see above). This can be done by one person or two people if the volunteer wants company for the ride. The sock pick up area could be Philadelphia, suburban Philadelphia, and parts of Delaware and New Jersey. While at the facility we’d like the volunteer to thank the group, explain the impact the donated socks will have for the homeless, take a few pictures of the socks and the group (for Facebook, Instagram, blog, etc.), and give the group a certificate of appreciation.
This is where the rubber hits the road…or the sock gets on the foot! For this volunteer opportunity, we need two people per vehicle. A week or so before the delivery, the shelters need to be contacted and a schedule developed. We need to know the hours that they can accept donations and whether they need men’s, women’s and/or children’s socks. The purple bags of socks are then loaded into the volunteer’s vehicle and delivered to the facility. The sock pick delivery area could be Philadelphia, suburban Philadelphia, and parts of Delaware and New Jersey.
We get lots of phone calls and emails and we need some help responding to all the inquiries. For this volunteer opportunity you would need to have access to email and a phone and be trained how to respond to the inquiries. You would also need to be comfortable accessing and entering information into programs such as Excel and Word, and using cloud-based programs. This could be done from any location.
We have many projects in our strategic plan that need some research. For this volunteer opportunity, you need to be both detailed-oriented and curious. You would also need to be comfortable accessing and entering information into programs such as Excel and Word, and using cloud-based programs. This could be done from any location.
We do lot of good things that are not getting the publicity that we would like. For this volunteer assignment, we simply need someone who is good at public relations, telling our story, and sharing it with local media. This could be done from any location.
We have several office projects that could benefit from a few hours of clerical work. This could range from organizing a mailing list, putting together a mailing, getting items ready for a presentation, organizing our marketing material, etc. For this volunteer opportunity, we need someone who is organized and detailed-oriented. Most of this would be done in our office, but some could be done online.
We receive a lot of our new socks from sock drives. For this volunteer opportunity, we are looking for people to organize socks drives in their school, office, church – or all three! Socks drives are fun and can help raise awareness of the plight of the homeless.
Donations are the life blood of a nonprofit and we are always looking for ways to increase our monetary donations. For this volunteer opportunity, we need people who feel comfortable raising money for The Joy of Sox. It could be as simple as organizing a “dress down day” or “crazy sock day” at your office or school, hosting a cocktail party, or getting a professional sports team to sponsor The Joy of Sox. We are sure there are a lot of volunteers with creative ideas so we would love to work with you!
For this volunteer opportunity, we are looking for people to research opportunities for obtaining grants and then preparing and submitting the grant. There are programs that we can train you on.
This volunteer opportunity will take a lot of time and energy, but will also be very rewarding. Please contact us to learn more!