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Ways to End Hunger |
Offer as Much Variety as Possible<< previous page |
Variety enables miracles
If you will do that, you will be amazed at what will occur:
- It will be much easier and much less costly than anything you’ve done before.
- It will thrill your clients in a way that standardized food boxes never will, and thrilling for you, too.
- You may well begin experiencing little miracles as products you thought no one would ever want turn out to be the surprise answer to someone’s prayer.
You’ve heard the saying, “God works in mysterious ways his wonders to perform”? So long as a pantry’s staff control and standardize the food that is offered to the pantry’s clients, there are no real opportunities for any miracles to occur. The only food that is going to get through is what you decide to let get through. That doesn’t leave much for God to work with in trying to answer peoples’ prayers. But if you are willing to put aside all that power and all that need for you to control what happens and trust that God wants to use you and your food pantry for his own purposes, you will:
- Find that within minutes of your putting out some pomegranates an Ethiopian refugee family you didn’t know was in your community will weep with incredulity and delight at your having made available to them a key part of a holiday celebration that you didn’t even know existed.
- Find the grumpy old man who never talks with anyone dancing a little jig of joy at being able to get a gallon can of water chestnuts.
- Have an old widow be so excited about being able to get a bag of kitty litter that she almost forgets to take the food she came to the pantry to get.
- Find that client after client is overjoyed to get the five-gallon institutional bags of pizza sauce that you were absolutely certain no one would ever want.
The point is that the more variety you offer your pantry’s clients, the more you increase the chances of meeting their needs, and the more you and your pantry can become miracle workers.
Handling suppliers’ objections
Won’t some of your pantry’s supporters react unfavorably to your replacing nice neat rows of “responsible” food—dried beans, powdered milk and white bread—with a messy collection of whatever happens to have made itself available? You can count on it. They will protest, and may even withdraw their support.
But you need to stick to your guns and affirm to them that the alternative to making these products available is your pantry being more of a barrier than a benefit to ending hunger, and that only after you are certain that everyone who is hungry has enough to eat are you willing to begin refining that food supply to accommodate non-hungry people’s notions of what is good food or bad food.