Meal Capacity Planning

Many volunteer organizations provide meals to seniors, healthcare workers, and people in need. Sometimes these meals are provided by local restaurants and sometimes the meals are created in-house.

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Inspiration

Resources like food are limited in the world. In times of a global pandemic, we need to be able to ensure that vulnerable members of the society lose their lives due to lack of food.

It is possible to arrange for monetary contributions and volunteers, but the most important aspect is effective and transparent execution of such voluntary action. It is of prime importance to be able to clearly identify the recipients so that resources like food, time spent by volunteers, money spent on transportation of rescue material etc is effectively monitored and tracked.

While feeding the birds, it occurred to me that birds might need more help during the lockdown since they depend on human food spill. Similarly, there are many under-privileged sections of the society who might be struggling because they fall outside the radar of governmental help. This resulted in the Food for All concept, shared here. This concept is proposed to help ensure that we can reach out to every person who needs help.

To kickstart, we formed a team of 15 people to brainstorm on how can we reach out to the people who are in need of help.

Currently many Government/Government officials/NGO/Trust/Volunteers etc are trying to collaborate and work as group. In our discussions it emerged that people are willing to contribute, but really unsure on how the funds will be utilized. Also, due to social distancing required to prevent further transmission of COVID-19, contributors are willing to donate food rations instead of money. We were able to identify the following issues that need to be addressed:

• Lack of transparency

The contributors want to know how their contributions are being utilized. They also want to ensure that the donations do reach the needy instead of being concentrated in a few pockets. If the transparency is missing, it could lead to a scarcity of funds/ contributions.

• Lack of centralized monitoring

Volunteers are spending a lot of time to identify the needy. This leads to a crunch in the time that could be better spent in reaching out to the people who need help. While, there are some records available at government or local level, they are isolated and not centralized. This again leads to loss of valuable time and trust of the contributors.

• Lack of need- based assessment

We realized that most of the providers provide equal quantity of rations to all needy families. But this one-size-fits-all approach is not the most effective It creates a discrepancy and social injustice. While, some support organizations have started to provide cooked food to ensure that no hoarding of essential food items is possible, it also means that more volunteers are required as well as a better approach for resource management.

What it does

Represent supply as number of available meals Represent demand as number of people needing meals Use best effort to map meals to people and show over or under utilization of meals

How I built it

Using Airtable

Challenges I ran into

We are new to Airtable so we are having step learning curve

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

  1. In my last 40 years of my life, I have never done anything like this, where I have contributed positively towards the benefit of the society.
  2. We are very happy that during this lock down period, we are using our time effectively by trying to understand/ help the situation, while still staying at home.
  3. With the implementation of Stage 1 (transitioning to Google Sheet and Telegram – implementation in progress), volunteers are realizing the true potential of collaborative working. They are excited to see how easy it is to manage the resources, maintain inventory, and maintain a high level of transparency.

What I learned

  1. Working with the grassroot level volunteers has given me an opportunity to work on my communication skills. It is a completely new learning as things work differently from the corporate environment.
  2. This project has given me a new perspective about life and myself. I have learnt that there is always something new to learn even when you have grown up and settled professionally.
  3. This project has allowed me space to appreciate how, trapped in the daily rut of our lives, it is easy to become self- centered. Volunteering and charity work teach one to be compassionate, thoughtful and selfless.

What's next for Meal Capacity Planning

  1. Add donor pages
  2. Bring transparency by providing complete picture of usage of money

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