What Happens Along the Way
The work is easy to name. What grows around it is harder to measure.
There are the things volunteers come to do: chop onions, sort donations, transport meals, pull weeds, load trucks. Then there are the things that happen while they are doing them.
In 2013, Tallu wrote about a volunteer who had become her friend. He traveled to the kitchen by bus each week, arrived on time, called if he was running late, and remembered staff birthdays. He treated his commitment to the work with great care.
When a Social Security employee questioned whether he could manage his own finances, Tallu described the person she knew: reliable, communicative, generous. The employee removed the requirement that someone else manage his benefits.
Her friend left beaming. Tallu reminded him that she had not changed the outcome. She had simply been there long enough to witness what he had already accomplished.
Years later, Jacob and Abhinav met during a Tuesday-night kitchen shift. Abhinav arrived and decided the knives needed sharpening. Jacob made fun of him. By the end of the evening, they had decided to become friends.
They eventually became roommates and Tuesday-night regulars. Between dull knives, endless potatoes, and the last dishes of the evening, a volunteer shift became a weekly ritual.
The circumstances are different, but both stories reveal something true about this work.
People come to be useful. They return because someone remembers their name. Slowly, almost unnoticed, strangers become regulars. Regulars become friends. Someone sees what another person carries and reflects it back to them.
Over 15 years, thousands of volunteers have helped grow food, prepare meals, and keep the work moving. Along the way, they have found purpose, humor, trust, and one another.
The onions get chopped. The meals get packed. The dishes eventually get washed.
And then there is everything else.
