Get Involved

If you are an individual or a part of a group interested in maintaining the facility, painting structures, working at our front desks, providing office support and data entry, donating technical support for our computer labs and networks, supplying janitorial support, and/or general delivery – we can use your help!

To get started contact our volunteer coordinator, David Craft.

Groups and Individuals Are Changing Lives

If you love working and helping to change lives then AOC is the place for you. The success AOC achieves in providing refuge and helping our residents regain self-sufficiency would not be possible without the generous support of our volunteers. You are making a difference in peoples lives when you volunteer at AOC. Join our volunteers who have helped AOC make a difference!

For more information about volunteer opportunities, contact AOC’s volunteer coordinator at 505-263-5564.

Who Has Made a Difference at AOC? The Soup Kitchen Yogis!!!

Soup Kitchen Yogis (SKY), a diverse volunteer group, cooks and serves a meal to the residents at the Albuquerque Opportunity Center (AOC) shelter on the fourth Sunday of every month. Since the AOC does not have kitchen facilities, the men who stay here depend on various meal sites in the city, or on their own resources, which often dwindle by the end of the month.

The efforts of Soup Kitchen Yogis are based on the idea common to many faiths and spiritual disciplines that the cultivation of generosity and fellowship are essential for realizing the connection and interdependence of human beings.

SKY volunteers recognize the enormous reward and fun in the practice of generosity and in the active creation of the type of community that cares in basic ways for those in our community who have less. SKY volunteers have an interest in addressing and responding to conditions of hunger and poverty close to home.

Soup Kitchen Yogis is supported by La Montanita Co-op, Los Poblanos Organics, and Whole Foods as well as by many individual small donors who give monthly. The meal is generally a hearty vegetarian, multi-course offering that consists as much as possible of organic and/or locally grown ingredients. Soup Kitchen Yogis makes everything from scratch, including traditional red chile, buttermilk biscuits, posole, and the ever-popular desserts like berry cobbler, apple crisp, and cookies.

Volunteers eat with AOC residents and staff and have the opportunity to hear their stories of meeting the challenges of housing instability in Albuquerque. AOC residents line up quickly to eat and a crew of residents spontaneously forms both before and after the meal to help set up and take down the tables.