Friendly Visits
The same volunteer, the same day, every week. Tea, cards, the crossword, or just company while the laundry turns.
Detroit · Wayne · Oakland · Macomb
No one should
grow old alone.
We match older adults across Southeast Michigan with trained neighbours who show up every single week — with a hot meal, a ride to dialysis, a fixed porch light, and the time to sit down and actually listen.
Always free to participants
Every volunteer background-checked
501(c)(3) nonprofit
0
older neighbours visited, fed and driven last year
Why we exist
Loneliness is not a mood. It is a medical emergency.
An older adult who eats every meal alone, who hasn't been asked a question in nine days, who cancels the cardiologist because there is no ride — that person is not simply lonely. They are at measurably higher risk of heart disease, dementia, falls and early death.
Southeast Michigan has one of the fastest-growing populations of adults over 65 in the Midwest, and the systems built to support them are stretched thin. Waiting lists run for months. Family lives three states away. Winter closes the doors.
We are the neighbour who knocks. Not a caseworker, not a call centre — a trained, background-checked human being who arrives on the same day every week and stays until the visit is done.
1 in 4
Adults 65 and older in the United States are considered socially isolated.
National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine
15 cigarettes
A day — the mortality risk the U.S. Surgeon General compares chronic loneliness to.
Surgeon General's Advisory on Social Connection, 2023
2 million+
Michiganders are aged 60 or older, and that number climbs every year.
Michigan Aging & Adult Services Agency
What we do
Eight programs. One promise: someone is coming.
Every service is free, and every one of them exists because an older neighbour told us it was the thing standing between them and staying home.
The Warm Line
A real voice every morning at an agreed time. If the phone isn't answered twice, we come to the door.
Meals & Groceries
Hot meals four days a week plus a monthly pantry box stocked with food people actually grew up eating.
Rides & Errands
Door-through-door transport to dialysis, the pharmacy, worship and the grocery store. We walk you in, and we wait.
Home Safety Squad
Grab bars, ramps, brighter bulbs, smoke alarms, snow off the steps. Most falls start in a room we can fix in an afternoon.
Tech Together
Patient, one-to-one coaching: video calls with grandchildren, telehealth appointments, and how to spot a scam call.
How it works
From a phone call to a friend, in about ten days.
Tell us who needs a neighbour
Call the Care Line or fill in one short form. Anyone can refer — a daughter in Arizona, a pastor, a pharmacist, or the person themselves.
We visit at the kitchen table
A coordinator comes to the home, listens for an hour, and builds the plan around what the person actually wants — not a checklist.
You meet your match
We introduce a trained volunteer chosen for shared language, faith, neighbourhood or interests, and then we keep checking in on both of you.
Last year, together
What showing up added up to.
0
older neighbours served
0
hours of companionship
0
meals delivered warm
0
rides to appointments
0
report feeling less lonely
My husband passed in the winter and I did not speak out loud for four days. Now Marcus comes Thursdays. I bake on Wednesdays so there is something for him. That is two days a week I have a reason.
I signed up thinking I was doing something charitable. Two years on, Mr. Okonkwo has taught me to make egusi soup, fix a carburettor and hold my tongue. I get more than I give.
Get involved
Three hours a month changes a life. Yours included.
Volunteer
Visit, drive, cook, call, or swing a hammer. Training is free, takes one Saturday, and we never leave you to figure it out alone.
Give monthly
$50 a month keeps one neighbour visited, fed and driven all year. Ninety-two cents of every dollar goes straight to programs.
Write a letter
No training, no schedule, no car needed. Handwrite a note and we will read it aloud on a porch in Detroit within two weeks.
Latest
News from the block.
The Home Safety Squad hit its 500th grab bar
Two years, forty-one volunteers, and one very patient plumber from Warren.
Read the story
Summer heat plan: cooling checks on 300 porches
How our volunteers spent the July heat advisory, and what we learned about who gets missed.
Read the story
A high school in Dearborn wrote 1,100 letters
What happens when a sophomore English class takes on Letters of Love as a term project.
Read the storySomeone on your street is eating dinner alone tonight.
You can change that this week. Refer a neighbour, sign up to visit, or fund a year of Thursdays for a stranger who will become a friend.