What We Do
Care-A-Vans
Our flagship program, Care-A-Vans, offers free on-demand transportation and shelter shuttle services to unhoused folks in Norman. Our on-demand program operates Monday through Friday, 9 am to 5 pm. For this program our unhoused friends directly request rides from us by texting our dispatch phone. Our shuttle service operates 7 days a week transporting our friends to shelters around a Norman.
If you use our services and have feedback (positive or negative) that you’d like to share with us, use this link to submit a feedback form.
How to Ask For A Ride
Since we do not currently have a dedicated dispatcher, the best way to reach us is to send a text message with your ride request to 405-532-6436. Please include the following information in your text:
(1) your name,
(2) total number of riders,
(3) pickup location, and
(4) dropoff location.
If you have a doctors appointment in the future, we will gladly add that to our schedule. Otherwise, our service runs based on a list of all requests and our ability to fulfill them.
Shuttle Service
We pick up folks staying at A Friend’s House starting at 7 am and continue to make runs until everyone has been transported to day shelters. We then offer shuttle service to our friends staying at Salvation Army at around 8:30 am.
Dinner for Friends
In 2020, Brandi Studley created the Social Injustice League of Norman (SILN), which laid the groundwork for our meal delivery program. Volunteer cooks sign up on our calendar to take turns preparing dinners and packaging them up. Our drivers then pick up the meals from the cooks and distribute them to our unsheltered neighbors—that subset of the unhoused community that sleeps outside or in tents—in various locations around Norman. In May 2023, we officially took this program over from SILN, and we currently deliver 50 meals every day, Monday through Thursday.
Volunteer Opportunity: Sign up to cook here
Care Packages
Care Packages is our harm reduction program that we offer as volunteers for the Oklahoma City-based organization SHRED the Stigma.
Recent research has shown that harm reduction leads to better outcomes for folks struggling with addiction than approaches premised on punishment and criminalization. Instead of forcing folks underground into more dangerous spaces, harm reduction draws drug users into relationships with people who genuinely care about their well-being and survival while they navigate their path as users. The care packages we hand out as volunteers for SHRED include clean needles, Naloxone, fentanyl test strips, and condoms. Currently we hand out about 150 care packages per month to our unhoused friends.