Interview with Becky T.

While my interview wasn’t super long, I felt it was really productive! My interview was with Becky, the volunteer coordinator at Our Daily Bread (ODB). My class worked with this organization last semester, and they were one of the groups who really had an enriching experience, and this was one of the reasons while I wanted to try to create a sustainable relationship study.

When I was talking with Becky, we discussed the project last semester, and we both discussed that while it wasn’t the most helpful for ODB, it was still a good start in the right direction. My students made volunteer brochures. We had both (naively) believed that since ODB just opened last semester, that there would be a large need for volunteers — whelp, that wasn’t the case. They are completely fine with the amount of volunteers they have. Becky told me that since she has been working with volunteers for a few months already, she has a good since of what projects would and wouldn’t be beneficial now. We talked about possible work my students could do such as social media campaigns, grants, and other written projects. She said all of these sounded good, and then I opened it up to one more idea.

One of my current students actually volunteers with ODB, and she noticed an issue with shoppers not taking produce. Shoppers usually have vouchers where they can only get one type of a certain item, but they can get as much produce as they want. My student mentioned that most shoppers don’t get very much to any produce, and she wanted to investigate ways they could change that so shoppers could have more healthy options and decrease the waste of produce. I mentioned this to Becky, and she really excited to learn more, and she wanted to meet with the student to discuss this further.

As a part of my class, my students have to meet with partners/clients twice a semester, and I asked Becky if that still would be all right, and she agreed. We also briefly discussed if there was anything from last semester she wanted to see change, or if there was any problematic issues that arose with working with the previous group that could be improved. She mentioned everything went well last semester, and she was really excited to work with the student who volunteers at ODB and the class.

All in all, this was only about a twenty minute conversation, but I was really fortunate that I had a student who already volunteers at ODB, who has that “inside” look, and that seemed to make this partnership more productive and almost create more of a sense of trust. My students who are working with ODB for this semester have actually already contacted ODB, and I see their first report next week, so I’m excited to see how their meeting went and what project they will be creating!