“This is the cafeteria from when this building was an elementary school. The food pantry started here on a much smaller scale when the community center first opened, just as a place for people to leave donations for community members in need, and we still have that. But after a while we all saw the need for meals for our elderly and homebound members, and I asked around to see if we could get larger-scale food donations to cook with. One thing led to another, and about a year ago we started this community kitchen and meal delivery service as a part of the food pantry.”

Olivia looked around the room. Everything looked clean and organized, with big piles of produce in stacks. Other volunteers—mostly older Black women, but lots of other ages and ethnicities, too—came in and put on aprons and said hi to Jamila.

“This is great. So you’ve been here from the beginning?”

Jamila waved at someone who’d just walked in.

“I have, and we’ve really grown. We started off with just a volunteer event on Friday nights once a month—at first, we really didn’t know what we were doing, and just sort of made big vats of soup or whatever based around our donations that week. Now we’re here twice weekly; on our Wednesday and Friday nights, we bring in volunteers to make complete, wholesome meals for members of our community who can’t get outside or cook for themselves easily. On Thursdays and Saturdays we have other sets of volunteers who do our deliveries. We try to make enough food each night for thirty to forty people, though our goal is to increase that to a hundred by the end of this year.”

Olivia hadn’t quite realized—despite Jamila’s mention of an apron—that she’d be cooking tonight.

“That’s an impressive goal,” she said. “To go from making thirty to forty meals to a hundred.”

Olivia really hoped they would give her very clear instructions with this whole cooking thing; that had never been her strong suit. She looked around at the ingredients set out at the different stations.

“How do you figure out what to make from week to week?”

Jamila smiled.

“That’s where I come in—I’ve worked as a cook in restaurants for a while. I’ve figured out a lot of recipes that work with some of our most frequent food donations, and that our community members will like.”

“Wow,” Olivia said. “That’s impressive. I bet that was a real challenge. They’re lucky to have you.”

Jamila handed her an apron.