Things are proceeding apace in soup-kitchen-land, I have drawn up my food safety documents and sent them off to be laminated, and we have a brand spanking new OSHA-certified first aid kit in the kitchen! Sweet! I brought it up today to my friend who runs the children’s ministries and she was a little bit grumpy because she’d ordered one of those too, but it accidentally got sent over to the little kitchen in the new building instead of put in the children’s wing. Unfortunate, but there are enough bandaids and such to go around for now, and the children’s ministry really does have a lot less knives and open flames and stuff. I hope, anyway! I got over to the mission board meeting and learned more about how to spend my budget (sort of, parts of it were kind of confusing, but I got the basics), so now I just need to get all the new supplies picked out. And it looks like we’re going to be doing Cajun food theme for my actual cooking week in the kitchen, so I need to find a good recipe for really, really large amounts of gumbo.
This time of year, the Lenten season, is also the time when commitment sheets go out to the church and we try to get people signed up for stuff. It’s the tithing commitment, how much money everybody plans to give to the church for the next year, but it’s also for the prayer chain, the children’s ministry, the hospitality team, and this year, the soup kitchen too! That’s right, we got nearly top-level billing as a major ministry of the church. Which is awesome, because it really is an important ministry and I’m very proud of it, but I’m kind of concerned that it might lead to a bunch of volunteers.
I know, counterintuitive, right? In most church ministries, getting volunteers is like panning for gold, and there’s never enough good people to go around. But I’ve been very lucky so far, and I inherited four strong teams for my four weeks every month. Two of the teams are already quite large, we’re talking sometimes upwards of fifteen volunteers on a Saturday morning. These are the teams that routinely take new people in. The other two groups are basically Sunday School classes who do soup kitchen as a ministry opportunity. They are much smaller teams, but they’ve been doing it forever and they have it down to a science. They do almost the same thing every month, but they do it well and everybody gets fed. Maybe it would be nice to see them open up to some new people, maybe it would be nice to get more variety in the menu, but I am loathe to mess with systems that are working, at least not right away when I know I’ve only got half a clue. The other two weeks are much more creative with the menus, so it’s not like it’s the same meal every week or anything. But the bottom line is, when I asked at the leaders’ meeting if anybody needed more volunteers, nobody raised their hands.
So.... that’s a bit of a problem. The number one absolute cardinal sin of organizing volunteers, in my book anyway, is sending out a call for assistance and then not following up. You do not want to get people to sign up to help you out, or to show up to help you out, for that matter, and then not give them anything to do. It’s the same philosophy whether you’re organizing one week of the soup kitchen, when sometimes I’ve been absolutely scrambling to find useful work for our newer volunteers during the slower times, or when you’re organizing the whole shebang. Because of the team structure of the soup kitchen, there will be times, every once in awhile, when an entire team will retire or just dissolve, and then you need a lot of volunteers quickly. But in the normal course of things, just not so much. A big influx of volunteers could be extremely disruptive. And I may just be borrowing trouble here, anticipating that a bunch of people will sign up for soup kitchen who aren’t already helping, but honestly, we’re Methodists. Food is a big thing! And in a church with several hundred members, it’s certainly not impossible that we could see eight or ten interested people, and I could be standing there with my mouth hanging open and at a loss for what to do. That’s not a good feeling.
So I took the question up with my pastor after he sent me a midnight email asking for a one-paragraph description of volunteering in the soup kitchen for the newsletter. I am always up at midnight anyway, but I think he was surprised at the speed with which I shot back a fairly detailed missive about my worries and some possible solutions. He mentioned that I was obviously a fast typist in his reply, which made me laugh, though I decided not to admit that I jumped on the opportunity to procrastinate in finishing the fanfic chapter I was working on. (It is still not finished.) Right now we are just hanging back to see how the volunteer situation actually plays out and whether there are any or many new volunteers. Depending on how many there are, we could do a couple of things. Some people could be routed to the community dinner team, the folks who get together every other month to put together the big all-church dinner. They always need more help, and it’s a similar skillset to soup kitchen, at least. Some people could help out with hospitality on Sunday mornings, helping people feel welcome and get coffee and stuff before church or Sunday school. Not very much the same, but in the same hospitality-and-helping vein.
If we were to somehow get lots and lots of volunteers, it’s possible that we might take a stab at expanding the mission. That’s always the most dangerous and exciting time for any ministry. Right now, our town has soup kitchens six days a week, every day a different church. There used to be soup kitchens every day, but the Sunday one closed down awhile ago and has not been replaced. I worry about that quite a bit, especially since it’s a day when the kids aren’t getting fed at school either. Right now we’ve been sort of obliquely dealing with it by providing to-go meals whenever we have extra food available, and Panera Bread is a godsend with their donations of day-old products that we make available for visitors to take home. I know a lot of people are getting their Sunday breakfasts and maybe more from their donated breads and bagels. But if we had enough volunteers to stretch to one or two more teams, maybe we could do at least one or two Sunday meals a month. Maybe we could even partner with another church to get Sunday meals up and running again. Wouldn’t that be great, a place available every day of the week? I don’t know if it’s feasible, I don’t know if we can make it happen soon or ever, but man, I would really like to. April 2 is the big day for turning in commitment cards, so we shall see!
In summary, I was going to end this entry with a cartoon about volunteering or soup kitchens because Tumblr, but all the ones I found were incredibly treacly or political commentary from five or ten or twenty years ago. So here’s Gordon Ramsay instead.