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Volunteer Carolyn Keele can often be found at the Manchester and Coffee County Senior Center, collecting money, doing paperwork and making new visitors feel welcome.

“She is everywhere I turn around,” Senior Center Director Diane Jernigan said.

“She is my shadow and she does a lot.”

Jernigan said the Manchester and Coffee County Senior Center, located at 603 Woodbury Highway, is a busy and active senior center.

“Our doors open at 8 a.m. and maybe three nights a week they are open past 10 p.m.,” she said.

Keele said she first went to the senior center with her mother-in-law back in 1987 for a music program on a Monday night.

“She said Carolyn let’s go and hear the music and I said okay because my mother-in-law was just like a mother to me,” Keele said. “It grew on me from then and then after I retired it really grew on me.”

Keele said one of the first things she was asked to do as a senior center volunteer was to collect the money for the music program on Monday night.

“I got asked if I would watch the door and take the money on a Monday night and I first said I don’t know about that, and she said, oh you will be okay, so ever since then I have been sitting there.”

“I enjoy people I guess,” Keele added.

Jernigan said volunteers are very important for the continued smooth operation of the senior center, and it takes at least 15 doing various things to keep the trains on the track.

“We have volunteers for every program we do,” she said. “The Bridge card games, they have volunteers that make phone calls and keep everything going. I don’t touch that activity and it is the same thing with our pool room, they clean their own tables, vacuum their own floors.”

Jernigan said the senior center does not employ a gardener, but that task also falls to a volunteer.

“He is about to help replant shrubs because we had to get rid of some shrubs that had died out,” she said.

Jernigan said she believes it is important for the community to have an active and vibrant senior center for its older generation of residents.

“I don’t know what will happen with the future ones coming up, but these people have been used to working in gardens and raising children and cooking big meals and once they retire, as we age our families have families and they are busy in their lives like we used to be but at the senior center there are many volunteer opportunities,” Jernigan said. “I think it is so good because just because you are older, it doesn’t mean your life is still not useful. You can still help in so many, many ways.”

Keele said she is at the senior center so often, that it feels like a home to her.

For senior citizens in the area that have never been to the Manchester and Coffee County Senior Center, Keele said she recommends they give it a chance.

“I would suggest they come and get involved and meet people,” she said. “It is a good place to socialize.”

When it comes to what she enjoys about volunteering the most, Keele said she likes to see new people come in and get involved that might be lonely.