Service at POTS

Maria, Erica, Kenia, Elizabeth, Kramer, Matt, and I worked as group B for our community services. We went to three soup kitchens: Part of the Solution (POTS), The Bowery Mission, (forgot the name of the other one) and a women & children support organization called HOUR.

At POTS, Dez-the group leader, gave us a warm introduction about this organization and showed her interests in us. She thought I am too quiet, so she put me in a position of host to welcome, count and lead to position for people coming. We have Maria serve drinks, another volunteer serve bottled water, Kramer and Elizabeth serve food, Kenia and Erica fill plates, and Matt help clean up and close up tables.

I counted people in headcounts with information of gender, seniority, and familial group. Compared with counting in other spots, the statistics used by POTS contains more information than just counted the number or with names. However, more people showed up for second or third round at POTS, indicating the food per plate may not be as much as other spots and the actual number of people served shrank (usually 450 headcounts/day, on our day it’s 380). The benefits of this may be to decrease the amount of wastes of food per plate, and people can adjust their needs by returning, other than one big meal, which may be a little too much for some but not enough for some who would return but would not finish the second plate. However, people may take their favorite food and throw away other parts. Self-served spots may prevent some of the wastes by people choosing their own wants. In both situations, the balance of nutrition would be lost. The solution may be to provide more choices and serve in a more customized ways. If the salad were from Whole Food and coffee from Starbucks as at The Bowery Mission, I think few would reject.

At POTS, there are only two employees and others are all volunteers. Jim worked as full-time volunteer. Deb said that when volunteers not show up for the day, sometimes she had to do everything with Erin (another employee). It is good to know that a high school volunteer worked on our day has fifty hours required volunteer time at POTS and other 150 hours at other places. At all these three places, there are staff-treated volunteers. They know more and know how, and they are part of the solution and cares for everyone as guests and family members. On the other side, I heard some full-time volunteers took stuff from food pantry as their rewards on our second spot. Nu who worked there told me also that some of the volunteers had bad attitude to guests and after her repeated persuasion, some simply quit the work and now they only have one existed volunteer. Volunteers may react differently due to their backgrounds and their awareness of what they are doing, but the change in new generation of volunteers is positive. They can also try to use more volunteers to serve shorter period as what is done at the shelter a speaker talked about at YSOP. Well, that is only workable while split work is repeatable and can be learnt easily, and some people need to know the big picture and do more integrated job like cooking in the kitchen. Therefore, all-volunteer-run soup kitchen may not be that easy as it is mostly in the daytime and the staffs can only do a part-time job if they don’t ask for salaries here due to time and labor limitation.

Can we save some volunteers for future use if the efficiency of soup kitchen be improved, so that the possibility of no-show-up volunteers be decreased at spots? I thought at POTS, they could try to use plates or carts to serve drinks and plates in a more efficient way. I know they split the work because there were quite enough volunteers that day, but I don’t know what they choose to do to save human resources with fewer volunteers or even with only two staffs. I asked Linda how they would do and whether they could put napkin and forks in a container on each table to save some work. Linda told me that sometimes it is important to have more than enough volunteers as a way to increase awareness and spread it out. Also, each spot has some regular volunteers they maintain, so they can call them if no volunteer show up on some day. As for the forks and napkins, they have to serve them in case guests touch other forks, as a sanitary requirement, if napkin not folded on the forks. The truth is usually deeper than first seen or with shallow thoughts. Therefore, the engagement and exploration is encouraged to see the big picture and seek the roots of issues as more engaged citizens.

I also found that it is necessary not only to do the work, but also to connect emotionally with other volunteers and employees. Mostly, they are doing the same job day after day and may get tired sometimes especially when they have other tasks, like looking for a job, in such a big city. They have a desire to share their happiness and pride of doing their jobs and discuss their thoughts and spread out the awareness and responsibilities. It is so encouraging to see how my teammates showed their interests to know more about everything-funding, difficulties, resources, employees, operations, how they tried to accomplish constructive conversations, and the relaxing and respectful atmosphere they tent to offer. It is so cheerful each time I saw how they mopped the floor as shining as a same mirror at different places! Having a feeling of part of a team is critical to bring more people into the “volunteer’ position in the active citizen continuum. “Great things may be done by mass efforts."

When I worked as a host at POTS, Deb asked me to fill a table before bring people to the next one. The lunch hour at POTS is 3.5 hours, which is much longer than other places we served. In the middle of the period, I worked around the “rules” by placing people more to the table near drinks and food spots so that other volunteers wouldn’t walk back and forth that long. Sometimes conflicts exist between human and rules, but the basic values and principles are worth persistence. As the words in the kitchen of the Bowery Mission, it is all about “Serve your guests as you are serving a King.”

by Xin Zhang