Home Borrowers Service Volunteer

Save to Favorites

Home Borrowers are trained and then matched with customers who cannot leave their homes due to illness, disability or lack of transportation. Consideration is given to matching the customer's reading preferences and the volunteer's likes and dislikes. The Ocean County Library’s Home Borrowers Service, this is a long term commitment that requires a detailed oriented individual who has reader’s advisory and good communication skills. Our volunteers must be familiar with our library catalog in order to choose library materials and put specific requests on hold. They must also keep records of materials previously checked out for the customer and be able to recommend and/or discuss materials with the customer. Our volunteers visit homebound customers who have one or several disabilities and, as a result, tend to feel extremely vulnerable with having strangers in their homes. Therefore, to insure our customer’s privacy, confidentiality and safety we have found that the most successful match for this opportunity is a one-on-one relationship. A group visit is many times unsettling to our homebound customers--therefore group volunteering is not suitable for this volunteering opportunity.