Notes on Volunteering at the Food Bank
I've been volunteering at a food bank in our area for a while now. I don't want to make a big thing of it — plenty of people volunteer, and I'm not looking for credit. But the experience has taught me enough that I think it's worth writing about, if only because I went in with a lot of assumptions that turned out to be wrong, and maybe someone reading this has the same assumptions.
I started because I had the time and felt like I should be doing something useful with some of it. My work as a freelancer means my schedule is irregular. Some weeks are packed; others have gaps. I saw a flyer — I think it was at the library, or maybe the community center, I honestly don't remember — asking for volunteers to help with sorting and distribution. I signed up expecting to show up once, feel good about it, and maybe not go back. That was quite some time ago. I've been going regularly since.
The first thing that surprised me was the logistics. I had a vague image of food banks as a room full of canned goods that people come and pick through. The reality is much more complex. The food bank I volunteer at operates more like a small warehouse. Donations come in from multiple sources — grocery stores, restaurants, farms, individual donors, government surplus programs — and each source has different requirements for handling, storage, and documentation. Perishable items need to be sorted and distributed quickly. Shelf-stable goods need to be checked for expiration dates and stored in a way that makes inventory management possible. Frozen items need cold chain maintenance, which in practice means a lot of attention paid to freezer space and temperature logs.
The sorting process is where I spend most of my time. When a donation comes in, it needs to be inspected, categorized, and shelved or queued for distribution. This is more nuanced than it sounds. You can't just put everything on a shelf and call it done. Items need to be grouped in a way that makes it easy to assemble balanced food packages — proteins, grains, fruits, vegetables, dairy if available. The goal is not just to give people food but to give them food they can actually make meals from. A bag full of random canned goods is less useful than a thoughtfully assembled selection that includes, say, rice, beans, canned tomatoes, and a protein.
I was not prepared for how much food gets donated that can't be distributed. Expired items, obviously, but also damaged packaging, items that have been improperly stored, opened containers, and things that are technically edible but that no one would reasonably want to eat. Some donations are clearly people cleaning out their pantries — a grab bag of odds and ends, some of which expired years ago. I don't say this to criticize donors. Any donation is well-intentioned. But there's a gap between the intention to help and the practical reality of what's useful to a food bank, and that gap generates waste and sorting labor that most people don't think about.
The distribution side is its own operation. The food bank I work with runs a weekly distribution where families come and receive pre-assembled packages. There's also a referral system for emergency food assistance, where people in acute need can come outside the regular schedule. The volunteers who handle distribution have a different skill set than the ones who handle sorting — it's more interpersonal, more emotionally demanding. I've done a few distribution shifts and I respect the people who do it regularly. It requires patience, empathy, and the ability to maintain someone's dignity in a situation where dignity is easily undermined.
I mostly stick to sorting and inventory because that's where my temperament fits. I'm good at repetitive, systematic tasks. I don't mind spending a few hours checking dates on cans and organizing shelves. It's not glamorous, but it's necessary, and there's a quiet satisfaction in looking at a well-organized storage area and knowing that the distribution team will be able to put together packages efficiently because everything is where it should be. It's the same satisfaction I get from organizing files, honestly, just with heavier objects.
One thing that's changed my perspective is the sheer volume of need. Before I started volunteering, I had an abstract understanding that food insecurity existed in our area. I knew the statistics. But there's a difference between knowing a number and watching a line of people form outside a building on a weekday morning, each of them carrying bags to fill. The people who come to the food bank are not who I would have expected. There are elderly people on fixed incomes who can't keep up with rising grocery prices. There are working families — people with jobs, sometimes multiple jobs — who still can't make ends meet. There are people who were doing fine until a medical bill or a car repair or a rent increase pushed them over the edge. Food insecurity is not a character flaw; it's a math problem that a lot of people are losing through no fault of their own.
I've also been struck by the community that forms around the food bank. The other volunteers are a cross-section of the area — retirees, students, people between jobs, church groups, the occasional corporate team doing a volunteer day. There's a regular crew of us who show up most weeks, and we've developed a comfortable working rapport. We don't socialize much outside of shifts, but there's an easy camaraderie that comes from doing physical work together toward a shared purpose. It's one of the few contexts in my life where I interact regularly with people I wouldn't otherwise meet, and I value that more than I expected to.
The operational side of the food bank has also been educational. The organization runs on a surprisingly thin staff — a couple of full-time employees and a lot of volunteer labor. Running a food bank is, in many ways, a supply chain management problem layered on top of a social services mission, and doing it well requires skills that would be handsomely compensated in the private sector.
I don't have a grand thesis about food banks or food insecurity. I'm not qualified to propose policy solutions. What I can say is that the experience of showing up regularly and doing unglamorous physical work in service of other people has been good for me in ways I didn't anticipate. It gets me out of my home office. It gives me a sense of contributing to something beyond my own small concerns. And it's given me a more grounded understanding of what life is like for people in our community who are dealing with challenges I've been fortunate enough to avoid.
If you have a few hours a week and a food bank or similar organization near you is looking for help, I'd encourage you to try it. You don't need special skills. You just need to show up and be willing to do what needs doing. It's not complicated, and it matters.
— Kevin Vadala