Twenty Service Points for Packing Food, Two for a Workout

The organizers wanted a bigger crowd, so they went to the football team. The way to get traction, one of them told the student paper, The Polygon, was to combine it with sports. The team has a service-point system that rewards players for workouts and community service. "You usually get two points for doing a basic workout, and you had 20 points for doing this," said the school's director of service learning. Twenty-five or thirty football players showed up.

Twenty points against two. A worthy cause that understands the scoring system has a real advantage.

The other organizer told the Brooklyn Home Reporter what the work meant to her. "It feels pretty surreal that at 17, I can make a real impact in Brooklyn," she said. She had been stocking fridges for another semester, and they were emptied, she said, within minutes after she finished.

One Love's founder, Asmeret Berhe-Lumax, started it by stocking a single fridge in Brooklyn with her family during the pandemic. The fridges are open to anyone, no explanation required.

Then the hard part. After the bags were packed and loaded, the organizers had planned workshops on food insecurity, including what a food swamp is. They had not made that clear in advance. Many students and families left as soon as the bags were done. Next year, they told the paper, the workshops will come first.

The bag knows when it is full. The invitation does not say when you are finished.

We volunteered at our town food pantry in the spring, all five of us. The middle one packed boxes faster than anyone. The youngest put one can in each box and announced each one. The eldest stayed afterward for the orientation talk that nobody else stayed for, and came home and explained food deserts to us at dinner, for forty minutes.

Nobody left the table. That is the workshops-first model.