While the Super Bowl is a time to gather around the television with your friends and family to cheer on your favorite team, it is also an awesome time to serve your community. Indianapolis residents have welcomed the Super Bowl with plenty of cheer and grandeur, but they are also pretty excited to host the amazing Super Bowl volunteers who will help to make this year’s Super Bowl a success!

1. Super Baskets of Hope: Dedicated to delivering 7,000 baskets of hope to hospitalized children, the Super Baskets of Hope is the first project by a Super Bowl host city to reach across the country. Nearly 1,000 volunteers showed up to Bankers Life Field house in Indianapolis this Monday to create baskets of hope. Former Indianapolis Colts coach and proud spokesman for the organization, Tony Dungy, knew Indianapolis would take the legacy and service aspect of the game seriously.
2. Volunteers knitted scarves for Super Bowl Volunteers! Burrr!!! Indianapolis can be brutal in January! And according to the TIME.com news feed, Indianapolis residents welcomed the 8,000 Super Bowl Volunteers by knitting 13,000 scarves to keep volunteers warm during their stay in Indianapolis. To get into the knitting spirit, Indiana residents participated in “knit-ins” at libraries, cafes and shops across the state. Thanks to the unique and creative blue-and-white scarves, Super Bowl volunteers are highly recognizable. 
3. One Super Bowl attendee reported the amazing help volunteers provided him when simply asking for directions. Before joining the festivities, volunteers provided him with information about what time the park-and-ride services began, directions to the entrances, and helped him to navigate through security.
4. Other volunteers are helping to work events like the “NFL Experience,” a family fun event where people of all ages and physical ability can feel like they’re playing in a professional game. For the “NFL Experience” volunteers are needed to point families to their desired activity, the restrooms, concessions, and pick up trash, etc.
5. Save Our Adolescents from Prostitution (S.O.A.P.) Volunteers: about 150 volunteers for S.O.A.P. are heading to Indiana before the event, not to tailgate, but to pass out soap at Indianapolis motels. Each bar of soap will have a label on it with phrases like “Are you being threatened?” or “Are you witnessing young girls being prostituted?” The soap provides the number for a human trafficking hotline so that those at the hotel, or young girls who are being trafficked, will see it and can call for help.
6. Join the NFL and United Way’s Play 60 campaign to fight child obesity! Sometimes what is really needed is one person to get things started and organized. Help kids in your community increase their physical activity and eat more healthful foods. Use your talents to motivate kids to move more and eat better. Soon, kids in a class, neighborhood or community are getting fit together. 

Back home there are ways you too can serve your community during the Super Bowl. One volunteer said they plan on hosting a Super Bowl party for the youth at their church. You can also donate money to organizations such as the Souper Bowl, an organization dedicated to fighting hunger.  Whether they are advocating a specific cause or pointing people in the right direction, volunteers are everywhere in Indianapolis serving their community and making the Super Bowl awesome!

Related articles

• Make a Play to Fight Hunger (handsonblog.org)