When Community Gives Back

We hand out free groceries. Destiny brings back an apple pie.

I've stopped being able to say cleanly which direction the help runs.

When we have too many apples, we hand them out at the end of a shopping day. Destiny takes hers home and bakes a pie. Deep dish. Scratch crust, filling from scratch too. She calls it a '40s or a '60s version, depending on the day.

Then she brings it back for our staff and volunteers.

Some weeks it's chocoflan instead, when cocoa turns up in the sticker aisle. Some weeks it's monkey bread with praline sauce, made from the extra boxes of biscuit dough.

We spend a lot of time in this sector on logic models. Inputs on the left, outputs on the right. Resources in, outcomes out.

Try mapping this one.

Amy and Bruce give money. Holly and Sarah give their mornings, and they give money too. Apples and flour and a lot of other good things go out the door. A family gets fed.

Then a warm apple pie comes back through that same door, and the volunteers who came in to take care of somebody else are the ones being taken care of.

I don't know which column that goes in.

Destiny said something in an interview this spring that I keep coming back to: "Our definition of community is also like an extended family. So you guys are like family to us."

Destiny, you are like family to all of us at The Store.

She describes the baking as "paying it back." "Paying it forward."

I'd want to tell her she doesn't owe us anything. Because I don't think a debt is what's being settled here.

I think she's part of this now, the way we're part of hers.

Nobody planned that. It isn't in the model.

We say love is at the core of what we do. I hadn't thought hard enough about it running the other way.