The staff at the Milford Center nursing home have known for years that they have something special in Christopher Miller, their youngest volunteer. Even so, it was a surprise to hear that confirmed from Gov. Jack Markell.
Miller, an eighth-grade student at Milford Middle School, is the winner of this year’s Governor’s Youth Volunteer Service Award for health.
At 13, he’s put in over 1,000 hours of work at the Milford Center, including more over the summer of 2008 than most children his age would ever dream of spending at a paid summer job. He leads programs, gets to know the residents personally and has even come up with new activities of his own for the patients there.
“It’s great,” his mother, Jan Miller, said. “For him and just that the people of the state of Delaware can know their volunteers and how many hours they put in.”
He was nominated by his supervisor at the Milford Center, Jean Franks, early this year, but she and his parents made it a point not to tell him about the award until they got the call that he’d won.
“We weren’t sure we’d be able to do it — it became a kind of a game,” Jan said.
They pulled it off, though.
“I did not know until I received the letter from the state,” he said.
So when that call came, in late April, it was more than a bit of a shock.
“I was excited at first — I called Jean and thanked her…after that I was speechless,” he said.
He received his award personally from Markell at a ceremony on April 22 at Dover Downs.
The awards are divided by type of service, and Chris was named the top youth volunteer in the state for health. In the summer of 2008 alone, he racked up 296 volunteer hours — about 25 a week. He estimates that he’s spent more than 1,000 hours at the Milford Center in the last four years.
“During the school year, he spends every Saturday, every day off from school volunteering,” Jan said. “I can really see how he’s changed since he started.”
He started volunteering at the home when he was nine years old. The staff started out giving him simple tasks, helping other staffers and volunteers in their day-to-day jobs.
“I thought he could come in if there was something special, as an extra pair of hands,” Jan said.
But it quickly turned into far more than that. He started putting in eight-hour days three days a week over the summer, and as the years went on he got more and more responsibility, to the point where he now leads programs of his own.
Last summer, he started a gardening program for the center’s residents.
“A lot of the residents have Alzheimer’s Disease, and most of them, when they were young, lived on a farm or were farmers,” he said. “I thought gardening would be a good way to take them back to that.”
In addition to his own projects, Chris is part of the “sensory group,” which visits patients in their rooms to talk with them and hear stories from their lives.
“It’s really interesting to hear what they were like and what they did before they came here,” he said.
Christopher is by far the Milford Center’s youngest volunteer – the only other teenager is a high school senior, and the rest are adults.
“I like to help people who can’t help themselves,” he said.
Milford, Del. —
