You almost stay home. It’s Saturday, the coffee hasn’t kicked in, and the email invite said something vague like, “community garden volunteer.” You go because a coworker asked three times. Now you’re in a fenced in gravel lot surrounded by building supplies and piles of dirt with 20 of your coworkers. You’re wearing uncomfortably big gardening gloves, waiting to be told what to do.
A woman named Renee waves everyone toward her and gathers you into a semi-circle. You wait for the logistics. Wheelbarrows over there, dirt over there, water in the cooler, lunch at noon. Instead, she tells you about Curtis. He’s seventy-one, has lived four blocks from here his whole life, doesn’t drive or have a car, and three years ago the only grocery store he could walk to closed. The gas station that took its place sells chips and scratch tickets and not one fresh thing. She tells you the garden beds you’re about to build will grow food that Curtis and forty of his neighbors will help tend to and eat this summer.
“The store didn’t close because of bad luck,” says Renee. “A neighborhood doesn’t lose its only grocery by accident. It loses it to a zoning map and a few quarterly reports, to a decision made in a room nobody in this neighborhood was invited into.” Renee doesn’t oversell it. She just says, “So you’re not really building garden beds today. You’re building the only fresh food within walking distance for people who had theirs taken from them.”
Your throat tightens, which is not what you expected at nine in the morning. The block you grew up on didn’t have much either. Your mother used to take two buses to a market across town because your family couldn’t afford a car and the store on your corner didn’t sell much you could call dinner. Of course, nobody in the community treated the situation as a tragedy. The people on your block traded what they had, a ride here, a few bags of groceries split there, and people managed fine. You assume this community is probably the same — resilient. So, you know that none of this is about people who can’t take care of themselves. It’s about a place the grocery chains decided wasn’t profitable.
You reach for a raised bed frame, and the corner bracket fights you. A guy named Theo crouches beside you without taking it out of your hands. He grabs the other end, says, “Yeah, these things never line up, hold it like this,” and the joint snaps true. Then he’s gone, off to the next person who’s stuck. Ten minutes later, you hear yourself say, “Hold it like this,” to a stranger, and your hands move like they’ve done this for years.
The work settles into a rhythm. Carting wheelbarrows of wet earth to the finished beds, sun on the back of your neck, you end up shoulder to shoulder with Teréz from the accounting floor. You’ve ridden the elevator with her a hundred times and have never once spoken to her. Somewhere around the fourth wheelbarrow of dirt she mentions her grandmother grew tomatoes on a fire escape in Queens, and you tell her about the peppers your dad grew in a coffee can on the windowsill, the ones that never made it past Thanksgiving but that he started over every spring anyway, and you’re both laughing.
After lunch, a man in a well-worn windbreaker that has clearly survived four decades drifts in from the row houses. He watches from the fence for a while, then comes over, introduces himself as Curtis. He tells you which corner catches the best afternoon light, because he’s seen this lot sit empty for years. Eventually he grabs his own set of oversized gardening gloves and helps you smooth dirt into the newly built beds, talking about the neighborhood in the “old days.”
When Theo comes around an hour later to tell you to wrap it up and circle back up with the others, you’re feeling like you’d happily call it a day. Renee gathers everyone in a circle again, and you expect the usual wrap-up that you get at these kinds of events – numbers of volunteers, the beds-finished number, the thanks-for-your-service. Instead, she asks, “What surprised you today? Was it what you expected?” And then she waits.
The quiet stretches out thoughtfully. Teréz speaks first. She says she volunteered because she wanted to feel useful, to help. Instead, she feels a little ashamed, because she’s driven past this neighborhood for years and never once thought about the people who lived here. Someone else shares how surprised they are with what was accomplished in only four hours. A man near the back says the part that stays with him is that none of this is an accident. Ten more gardens won’t undo what a zoning map and a few quarterly reports have set in motion. Nobody hurries to fill the silence after that.
You surprise yourself by speaking up. You start with the easy version, that you came in reluctant to give up a Saturday and you’re leaving wanting to come back. But it keeps going past where you meant to stop. You tell them you grew up in a neighborhood just like this one, that your family had had to do without because they were too poor to own a car. You say you’d spent the whole morning assured that you were the one who already understood, who didn’t need any of this. Then you hear yourself say the part you didn’t plan. You can’t remember the last time you’d thought about what that was like – going without fresh food.
Renee thanks you, gives it another minute of silence, and then thanks the group for sharing. She invites those who didn’t share to continue reflecting as they head home. You drive home with dirt under your nails and the windows down, thinking about Curtis and when you can volunteer again.
This is what Transformative Volunteering feels like in action. It’s the discomfort of examining the unexamined and realizing what you don’t know, paired with the satisfaction of expanding your worldview, connecting with colleagues and neighbors on a level you never have before, and reinvigorating your drive to make a real difference.
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