DISTINGUISHED VISITOR ALERT!
At our distribution on Tuesday, June 1, we will be honored to welcome U.S. Representative Jahana Hayes. Congresswoman Hayes will tour the Pantry, meet volunteers and clients, and learn more about Daily Bread's work in some of the communities she represents. Rep. Hayes, a former National Teacher of the Year, has long been interested in hunger issues, and is currently co-sponsoring the bicameral Student Food Security Act of 2021.
More Innovation at the Pantry!
The "Slopebuster Table Leveler," invented by Pete Jeffrey last month, seems to have set off a mini Space Race of innovations. Here are just two.
Crate Expectations
Our loyal crates (where pre-packed bags are placed to be picked up by clients) expect -- and deserve -- to be returned to the Pantry after their work is done. From time to time, however, a client would walk off with one. Not the client's fault - an overstuffed bag sometimes just refused to separate cleanly from its temporary home. Personally, I found the spectacle somewhat amusing. But Pattie Thompson, doubling down on being April's spotlighted volunteer, is made of more serious stuff. Using that old inventor standby, the bungee cord, or rather what seems like several hundred of them, the crates are now firmly affixed to sawn-off pallets. Raised a little higher, the bags are also easier to pick up. Genius!
Alexander the Grate
Last month we discussed the Perils of the Slope. This month, we must address an even bigger menace - the grate that lurks just outside the Pantry door. It was plainly on a mission to lay low any volunteers who let their guard down for a second, especially those valiantly carrying a sack of potatoes out to the parking lot. I call it Alexander. Because, well, no reason particularly.
Ken Fantel fixed Alexander's wagon by covering it with some expertly crafted plywood.
Ken may have been the blue-sky thinker that put a stop to the grate's mayhem, but a minor drawback was that we had to remember to bring the plywood in after every distribution. The first solution to this problem was to create a reminder, written on some cardboard where the plywood was stored. Which seemed like a reasonable approach to me. Then, seemingly overnight, the perfectly lettered legend you see here appeared on the plywood itself. The brilliance of this enhancement was immediately obvious to all. But the identity of the scribe was a complete mystery. For weeks, the Pantry was abuzz with rumor and speculation as one possible "suspect" after another was eliminated. Only when a five-gallon bucket of pickles appeared - and just as suddenly disappeared - did the chatterati move on to the next inexplicable phenomenon.
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Short story long, I can now reveal our elusive scribe was Wednesday donation-intake volunteer Emily Santella. Thanks Emily! To be clear, Emily had nothing to do with the pickles, as far as we know.
Alexander wept, for there were no more volunteers to conquer.
Plutarch, or possibly not.
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Our current distribution model - pre-packed bags handed out as quickly as possible - was pretty much the only option available during the height of the pandemic. While we all should be immensely proud of what we have accomplished in the last year or more, this model is not ideal for many reasons.
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To list just a few of those reasons, clients get virtually no choice of the food they receive, the quantity is not adjusted for family size, and with distribution times compressed into two very narrow windows each week, many people in the communities we serve have great difficulty in getting to the Pantry for the food they need.
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In the short and medium term, I do not think it is realistic to return to our pre-pandemic "In Pantry Choice" model - the client numbers are still too high. But it is not clear to me that such a return should necessarily be our goal. Even though that model addressed some of the shortcomings of what we currently are doing, it did not address them all.
The fact is, we are faced with a fundamental problem at the Pantry: the building is very small. Our 2019 renovation was designed, in part, to optimize storage and increase the "throughput" of clients during distributions. While it went a long way towards improving the situation, and certainly made the Pantry a much more inviting space, we still faced bottlenecks as clients moved through the aisles. This should hardly be surprising - giving clients a choice means, well, they have to choose. Choosing takes time, as anyone who has seen me staring into the freezers at Trader Joe's will know. And forcing people to choose quickly removes any real choice.
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OK Einstein, you say, all that is kinda obvious. What is your solution? And what about that tv show?
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Well, here's the thing. The tv show - Dr. Who - featured a time machine called a Tardis. The Tardis (Time And Relative Dimension In Space) was in the form of a Police Box, but that is not relevant here. Nor is the fact that it was a time machine - that's just silly childish nonsense, obviously (did I mention Dr. Who was a kid's show?). No, for our purposes, the interesting feature of the Tardis was that it was far bigger on the inside than its external dimensions!
If you have no idea what I'm on about here, and do not have time to follow the links, don't worry. The important thing is that, if we can get hold of the spatial technology of the Tardis, we can apply it to the Pantry and all our problems will be solved!
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So that's Plan A. I admit it has drawbacks, not the least being that Dr. Who - spoiler alert - is not real. So I have a few alternative plans.
Plan B is the more ploddingly obvious: move to somewhere with more space. I'm not ruling that out, but we did just spend an awful lot of money on the renovation, and space generally does not come cheap. Also, I like our current building, and it is a great location.
Plan C, the point of this entire waffle, returns us to Dr. Who. It relies on the Tardis-inspired insight that, in many circumstances, time and space are interchangeable commodities. In other words, the Pantry is plenty big enough to accommodate all of our clients and many more besides. Just not at the same time.
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By now, I'm sure the more sharp-witted of you will see where all this is going. Why don't we just open for longer hours? It would solve most, if not all, our problems. And it would allow for more opportunities to serve our clients and potential clients better.
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I have other ideas, but this article as usual has gotten too long and you still need to do the survey. Because, despite the advantages of trying a new model, any change relies on the support of you, my fellow volunteers. So, before going any further down this road, let me know what you think.
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Even if Alexander doesn't get you, it is not inconceivable working a distribution shift at the Pantry might put you in need of the services of Andrea de Lange, our go-to on-site physical therapist. Even if not, Andrea is wonderful to have around to properly coach us in the best way to pick up a 50lb bag of onions (and is not slow to tote a bag or two herself). Click on the logo to find out more!