To The Rescue

Yesterday I used some of my VTOP (Volunteer Time Off with Pay) time at the Denver Rescue Mission's warehouse.  I brought a friend, a management consultant from Accenture, and together we packed boxes of canned goods from piles and piles of donated items.

The good:  we put together perhaps a dozen boxes.  I am grateful to my employer.  VTOP is not necessarily common in the corporate world, and if each employee's fully-loaded cost runs $50/hour and each of the 2000+ employees donates the alloted eight hours per year my employer is donating $800,000, a pretty nice chunk of change.

The warehouse acts as a distribution center.  Volunteers sort items into boxes (for example, 48 cans of vegetables) that are loaded onto pallets and then onto trucks and then onto food pantries throughout the Denver metro area.

People donate all kinds of things.  For example, glass jars of pasta sauce, or those cardboard soup containers (just add hot water).  Those items cannot be safely shipped, so they are used in the local kitchens.  Some people donate bottled water.  This is not useful; Denver's water is clean and plentiful and basically free, bottled water can come from anywhere and contain anything; most importantly, water has no nutritional value.

The Rescue Mission uses an automated, though puzzling and isolated, scheduling system.  The web-site presents a customized, Javascript-free form that displays volunteering opportunities and allows folks to register.  The opportunity that interested me showed 18 open slots a month back.  I signed up and indicated a party size of one.  Then a few days before my shift I decided to invite my friend.  I returned to the website and tried to increase my party size to two.  The website rejected my request, informing me the offering was full.  I sent an email to the address on the page asking for special dispensation, which was granted the next day.  When we arrived at the warehouse we were by ourselves.  I wonder what became of the other 17 people?  And, the shift manager had no idea we were coming.

The not-so-good:  I'm not sure how valuable my contribution was.  I helped pack a dozen boxes, perhaps a week's worth of food for a few families.  The warehouse was full of pallets of from-the-factory boxes of food, such as Campbell's soup.  Maybe 10% of the food in the warehouse was from the one-off contributions that folks drop in cans and boxes scattered throughout the metro area.  My friend and I wondered whether our volunteer hours would not be better spent hounding the Campbells and Krafts of the world to donate more food, such food already being uniformly boxed and labeled and ready for distribution.  Or better spent lobbying Congress for larger food stamp benefits, so families can shop for exactly the kind of food they want to eat, when they want to eat it.

And, even if the drop-boxes are worthwhile, my friend and I were eager to apply our professional skills to the problem.  He dabbles in supply-chain management and has colleagues who have been doing nothing but supply-chain fifty hours per week for the last twenty years.  I enjoy wringing efficiencies out of anything.  The packing was complicated.  Vegetables go in this box, but tomatoes go in that box, and tomato _sauce_ goes in a third box, and the 15 ounce cans cannot be mixed with the 25 ounce cans, except for soup, where the 25 ounce cans are loaded on the bottom and are topped by 15 ounce cans.  Beans are separate, and pork and beans are not beans.  Sloppy joe mix is neither.  Could bar-code scanners and gravity-fed chutes streamline the effort?