Daytona Beach, FL - County employees and county inmates are joining forces to help make county personnel safe.
And Volusia County Community Information says it's truly a collective effort involving lots of people learning a new craft: making masks. This new effort going forth is to help protect the health of county employees so they can remain on the job serving the public.
“It’s wonderful to see how our employees are working to support each other and our community during this time,” said Jaime Edmondson, diversity & inclusion specialist in the county’s human resources division and one of the organizers of the mask-making initiative. “It’s such important, life-saving work.”
Two county divisions – community services and human resources – teamed up to launch the program, which is dubbed Volusia CARES, about a week ago. Another intergral partner to the program was the University of Florida, Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences Volusia County Extension. They helped get the program off the ground, providing all of the sewing machines, cotton material, thread and other necessary supplies along with the training on how to create a mask from scratch.
The training rooms on the 1st floor of the Thomas C. Kelly Administration Center in DeLand were then turned into a temporary sewing room, with as many as 60 employees taking one-hour rotating shifts at a time throughout the workday.
Production rooms also have been set up in library services and the Ocean Center as well. So far, they’re putting out approximately 75-100 masks a day and already more than 200 have been distributed to county employees.
“Our public employees consider themselves servants to the public, and they’re really resilient and nimble,” Community Services Director Dona Butler said in explaining the program at a recent County Council meeting.
And about a dozen inmates at Volusia County Jail – under supervision – add to the effort by making masks five days a week. The inmates have already made more than 600 masks, and 150 of them were recently distributed to the county’s public works
division.
“The Volusia County Division of Corrections is a great resource for Volusia County,” said Corrections Director Mark Flowers. “We continue to look for ways for the inmates to give back to society and prove that they’re not bad people, but rather people who just made bad choices and deserve a second chance.”
Flowers went on to add that the mask making is redemptive and time well spent.
