Service isn’t always your typical stuff - some people come up with brilliantly creative, small-scale, and touching ideas. New York CharityFocus collected leftover food from restaurants and handed it out to the homeless. Most food places won’t give away left over food - they worry that it’s not up to standards, and therefore leaves them liable. CharityFocus managed to convince some great places to give them food.

But it wasn’t quite as simple as just giving out food:

The reactions ran the gamut. Some folks came out of shops and repeatedly said, ‘This is amazing, God bless you.’ The first gentleman that we connected with actually just started crying, as we tried to connect with him as a person instead of creating a transaction. We were trying to not just come to bring food, but to help satiate the part of a person that is beyond food. We wanted to connect, but we quickly found out that it just isn’t that easy. One guy was trying to grab up as much as he could. When we asked him to share for the good of the whole, his exasperated response was “I’m hungry… I see what you’re doing, but I’M HUNGRY.” And so it was.
There was a desperation in the air, and it quickly went from an attempt to connect with new friends to an operation to efficiently dole out food as quickly as possible.

In the past, CharityFocus has given out cookies and lemonade to passerby in Central Park. But this time things were different; this good deed brought up a lot of questions. In the end, they did good - and opened the door to a lot of thought.

Tags: CharityFocus, homeless, poverty

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 1st, 2008 at 11:00 am and is filed under Inspiration, ServiceNation. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.