a journal of...

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Friday, January 19, 2018

PORCH, or who I am

Last December I offered to take the place of a vacationing friend who collects and helps sort food donations from our neighborhood for PORCH, an entirely volunteer-run local organization begun seven years ago by three local women to help relieve hunger.  I liked it so much, I promised myself that come the new year, I would continue volunteering there...not just intending to, but actually putting it on the calendar, and showing up.  

I’d been thinking about doing more for PORCH for some time, anyway. Aside from leaving grocery bags of cans, boxes, jars and sacs outside my kitchen door for the monthly pick-up, I hadn’t really put my hand to anything helpful in a community way since I’d moved house four years ago.  It was, in fact, the first time in…let’s see…forty-some years that I wasn’t active somewhere as a volunteer, beginning with my children’s preschool. 



From the first, I’ve been impressed by the way PORCH could do all it does without any levels of bureaucracy…indeed without any paid staff or lease.  Founders Susan Romaine, Debbie Horwitz, and Christine Cotton were neighbors who worried over the hunger they saw in their separate volunteer work, especially among school children.

PORCH works on the simplest principle possible:  one is the basic number.  One family puts one sac of food (even one can is acceptable) on its porch and one neighborhood driver, in her/his own car, volunteers to pick it and others up to bring to one common site.  At the site, (also generously donated by a local church) volunteers, one by one, gather to unpack and rebag the donations, then one by one, drivers, each in their own cars, redistribute the bags to people and agencies who need it.  The power of one means that all those many ones make one morning a month's work into a substantial impact on hunger.  Besides the many generous households who leave bags of food or checks on their porches for their neighborhood coordinator, an increasing number of businesses—especially, but not only food-related companies—give goods, money, time and advertising, often on word-of-mouth recommendations.  Thanks to all of them, PORCH has provided our community with nearly $2 million of hunger relief; add in the other PORCH sites which have sprung up on this model, and it sounds more like $3.5 million.

Lately, the PORCH  emails had been asking for not only more hot cereals, hearty soups, and snacks for the winter, but more help as well.  So this month, I returned to join the other deliverers, gatherers, unpackers, sorters, repackers and re-deliverers, and over the next few hours floated from task to task in the large space, learning the routines more firmly.  It’s a well-run group with people who don’t mind doing what they’re asked, and who pick up pretty quickly on the next thing needed or the next thing to be figured out.  Everyone is there to help.  As many volunteer organizations as I’ve belonged to over the decades, from grass-roots to multi-national, I admired this group’s energy...dedicated, efficient, cheerful...and amazingly ego-less.


Naturally, as I worked, I learned more than simply how to get food from my kitchen to someone else’s in need.  Watching people moving around me, and moving me around, I began to listen for where the volunteers had come from and why.  From “We started this because…” to “It’s such a wonderful  group of people” to “My wife brought me along” to “I’m doing a month of community service for a traffic violation” to “I work for a food pantry in a shelter…”  They included two of the local police who lent a hand sorting, carrying, pushing tables and chairs around, staying til the very end—it’s part of the task to clean up and return the space to its original use when the party’s over. 


As I did last month, after the sorting I offered to drive a few dozen bags to one of the places that distribute goods, last time a mission, this time the county social services.  PORCH isn’t the only organization donating food to schools and food pantries. But it provides a hefty amount of basic nutrition where it’s needed, including fresh foods bought with cash donations or given by grocers.  Most impressively, they offer help to  nearly 400 hundred individual families through school counselors and other community need-watchers.    My deliveries afforded me the chance to look into those spaces, too, watching how they worked, who they worked for, how much they needed.  It's never just a job for a few hours; it's education into increasingly wide circles of society.




While I packed and delivered, I thought about what appealed to me, personally, about such work.  The first appeal came immediately:  philosophically, and for better or worse, I’m one of those people who, as an old friend used to say about herself, feed people.  Hunger is one of the things I’ve, thankfully, rarely suffered, but I imagine it well.  I’m a kitchen person…even while I'm pulling things off the shelf to donate, I’m organizing a bag in terms of protein, fruit, starch, vegetables, milk…

And then there is the appeal of all that sorting and packing.  Like my favorite work with the Friends of the Library, I can’t help bringing order to a pile of thrown-together donations so they make sense for somebody.  You laugh…but it’s true.  (My sister is the same way, so she better not be laughing.)  Categories, sequences, and patterns are me/I.  How I loved diagramming sentences in grade school!  How quickly and avidly I could organize anything from library shelves to syllabi to a committee  agenda!

Too, it’s the accessibility of the volunteer work.  The tasks are simple enough, and yet there is so much need for them, and it is so easy to step in and lend a hand.  Often, they lead to other “jobs” equally as appealing and just as needful.  Busy people, it seems, are often found in the same multiple places, a network of community knowing and doing.




But mostly, and this most selfishly, it’s one of the best ways I know to get myself further out into the world, connecting with what’s going on…really going on…outside the walls of my house and my neighborhood. You learn so much, for one thing, and you can never go back to thinking that you’ve seen or done enough to make things better.

Photographs of PORCH activities thanks to Christine Cotton, Debbie Horwitz, and Mary Sonis; OCIM.

2 comments:

  1. Absolutely wonderful!!! I will now go figure out how to share this blog!

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  2. Hi Rachel, I serve as a neighborhood coordinator for PORCH h in Durham, North Carolina. I just submitted a blurb to Nextdoor Treyburn trying to recruit new volunteers in our neighborhood, Treyburn. Would you mind if I post the link to your article? It is so well written and would provide those interested with a first-hand account of what it is really like to participate. Thank you for considering my request. Peace, Dana

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