What’s It Like to Volunteer?

Board Member Marty Erhart shares his experience of volunteering at one of our free mobile markets.

It was like opening gifts on Christmas morning

Before volunteering at my first food giveaway, for several years I had used my marketing and graphic design skills to help raise Keep Austin Fed’s visibility to the general public. And while this has made more people aware of the widespread food insecurity in Central Texas and helped increase our number of volunteers and donors, I felt it was now time for me to do more. 

So when Adrian reached out to me to assist him with food distribution every Thursday morning, I knew it would be a good fit for my schedule. On that first day, I helped load FRAN the van with tables and around 20 boxes of food. Once we arrived at the distribution point, we set up three long tables and arranged all the boxes of food in two rows on them so our recipients could walk around them to select the items they wanted. We had about 18 folks show up for the giveaway. To help avoid a free-for-all, we had them select randomly numbered cards. Before beginning, we did our best to line everyone up according to the number they had selected. 

Everyone was so excited (including me)! The only thing I can compare it to is the anticipation of opening gifts on Christmas morning, and once they started going around the tables there was no stopping them! Fortunately, we had enough of everything so everyone left happy (but that doesn’t mean there wasn’t fierce competition for certain items). In a matter of minutes it was over — nearly all of the food gone from the boxes. Everyone was very appreciative, thanking Adrian and me over and over. The feeling I got from them was truly magical, knowing that this one event had made a big difference in their daily lives.

I know I got more happiness out of that volunteer opportunity than I ever thought I would. And now I can’t wait for next Thursday so I can do it all again!