Volunteers with staff in our kitchen pre-pandemic. Photo by Abigail Bobo.
by Christa Bentley,
Interim Co-CEO, Chief Programs Officer
A little over a year ago I was having my first day back after a leisurely maternity leave, mid-February 2020. I remember I spent my first two weeks back working virtually because I wasn’t ready yet to leave my sweet babe, and it was such a challenge. I hated not being in the room with everyone I was working with. Two weeks later, the day after my first scheduled day back at the office, I woke up to news reports of a devastating tornado in Nashville. Two weeks after that we shut down our volunteer program to stop the spread of COVID-19 and here I’ve been at my home office (let’s be honest, it’s my dining room) ever since.
Today I want to share an open look with all of you at where we are right now with our volunteer program. It is wild to even think that we are coming up on almost a year of very few volunteers in our kitchens, gardens, and food trucks. TNFP’s Volunteer Program has been the backbone of our organization since our inception, spurred on by the support we felt from so many during the 2010 Nashville flood. It’s how our community has responded to nearly every significant crisis, by filling our spaces with helping hands to amplify our work. But COVID-19 has been an entirely new crisis for our city and for The Nashville Food Project. We have had to make so many changes to the way we work to nourish our community. And the loss of volunteers has proved one of the biggest differences, requiring a lot more time in the trenches for our small but mighty team: chopping, weeding, and cooking more than we ever have had to do on our own.
A few months into the pandemic we created a tool we’ve been calling our “phased plan” (the linked plan shows some of the details we’ve included) to help us make decisions about all aspects of our programming, including how many people and volunteers we welcome back into our spaces and when. The plan is broken down into 4 phases (A,B,C,D), and each details a lot of the things our staff were wondering about: work from home, space capacity, in-person meetings, output capacity, on-site protocols, you name it. Our move from each phase is dictated by 4 weeks of consistently decreasing trends in the COVID diagnosis rates in Davidson County (we’re tracking this data available from Mayor Cooper’s office).
This is a conservative approach. We know this, but we also stand behind it. It has helped us make countless hard decisions and most importantly has kept our programming open. Because our kitchens are tight quarters, it has been vital that we keep exposure down. One positive test in our kitchens might mean an enormous scramble for our meals team and an inability to continue serving meals to our partner organizations, something we are desperately trying not to do with the need for access to food higher than it has ever been.
While the garden spaces do feel safer, our site capacities mean that we have to work through what is essential for our programming in our decision making, especially as many of the communities that participate in our garden programs have been disproportionately affected by this pandemic. We are constantly asking ourselves “does this keep people (staff and participants) that have to be on site safe” and “does this provide access to healthy food”? We are incredibly lucky to have had very few incidents of exposure in our spaces over the past year and we credit that to procedures that are truly working and staff that are willing to follow protocols even when it often means making their jobs harder.
I am sharing all of this now as we’ve got a little hope in our hearts for the chance to share this work with volunteers once again. As of Monday March 1st, we have moved into Phase B of our plan after many weeks of decreasing case rates. Additionally, we are starting to get some of our onsite team vaccinated, which has been one of our biggest concerns around introducing additional people into our spaces (especially as uncertainty still remains around the ability to spread the virus even after vaccination). This positive news means that we’re dreaming and working on engaging in this work with all of you once again. While these details will take a little time, I hope this message gives you hope that it is coming.
This year has given us a lot of time to think about our volunteer programs. Much of our timing in the past was built out of long ago necessity. As we are thinking about the future here are a few of the things that we have been talking about.
1. We would like volunteers to play an integral role in ensuring that we are using as much donated food as possible, decreasing the amount of food that ends up in the landfill and increasing our ability to batch cook and put things away when there is an abundance.
2. We would like volunteers to help us grow and maintain our garden sites, working on specific projects at our sites and engaging with the land and history of the land in meaningful ways.
3. We would like to increase accessibility to our volunteer times, expanding our hours into nights and weekends and diversifying the people who support this crucial work.
4. We would like to reintegrate volunteers into our work safely while also always providing an enjoyable, engaging experience for both volunteers and our dedicated staff.
We know that the coming months will come with more learning, just as the past year has. We want to thank you all for supporting us through it all, and for helping us learn and evolve. I have always treasured how seriously The Nashville Food Project takes the beginning of our mission statement, “Bringing people together…,” and I can’t wait to bring you all back into this work once again!