SFCG Volunteers at DC Central Kitchen

By Patricia Marby Harrison

SFCG interns and staff prepare meals in an assembly line

This Tuesday, SFCG staff and interns volunteered at DC Central Kitchen to help prepare meals for the homeless.

The purpose of this service project was “team bonding,” a space for us to have fun and get to know each other better while serving the local community. It was certainly a good opportunity to get out of the office and away from our computer screens and work together in a different way.

DC Central Kitchen rescues food that would otherwise go to waste, then prepares and delivers meals to partner social service agencies such as Meals on Wheels and after-school programs. SFCG staff and interns boiled corn, cut up steak, chopped onions and cooked rice for several hours, helping to prepare over 4,000 meals that would be distributed that day.

We worked under the expert guidance of the culinary staff at DC Central Kitchen, who showed us how to efficiently prepare delicious meals for their clients. Most of the staff are students and graduates of the Kitchen’s Culinary Job Training program; once homeless and hungry themselves, they received professional training and have “re-purposed” their lives to serve others. We were impressed by their talent, welcoming and cheerful spirits and patience with our lack of knife skills!

To our surprise, we discovered that part of the food we had been preparing was for our own lunch: at the end of the morning, the staff invited us to join them for a delicious meal, which they graciously served to us. After spending the morning working to help others, it was humbling to become the recipient of all the hard work that had gone into preparing the food.

DC Central Kitchen shares several of the values espoused by Search for Common Ground: the need to work collaboratively with other organizations to address interconnected problems, the understanding that such problems must be approached with a variety of creative tactics, and the belief that people can be empowered to build a new, more peaceful future for themselves and their community.

More than just a team bonding exercise, this experience confirmed those values for SFCG staff in a hands-on way.