In my DMP, I have a goal for serving 1,000 people in each quarter in 2025 and beyond. As I was contemplating my alliance task that I was going to do for the day of Thanksgiving this week, I thought, why not see how many people that I can serve on that day as practice.

Now when I originally setup that goal for 2025, serving a 1,000 people seemed like a stretch goal. That’s over 300 people in a month, when I’m lucky if I see that many in a quarter. Anyway, what better day to serve people than on Thanksgiving?

Also, I had signed up over a month ago to volunteer some time at the Salvation Army that day, but I was going to be in the back, setting up routes for the drivers who were delivering meals.
I’m an optimist though, so I just set my task and intention to help as many people as I could that day.

So, this is how the day went, and my calculations that went along with it:

– I showed up for my task to setup delivery routes, along with another guy. So, I served him, as he had done the task before, so I followed his guidance. # served = 1.

– Then when we completed that task early, I asked the volunteer coordinator for a new task, so she guided me into another room where they were cutting up pies and packaging them for the deliveries. So, I started to serve those in that room. # served = 3, total # = 4.

– When that task was finished, we were waiting on the hot food to be delivered from the Army base, so we had some down time. In that down time, we were double checking the addresses of the deliveries, and some of them were in areas that could be better served by other delivery locations, so I worked with one of the guys in the radio room to get 4 people reassigned to them. I also called one of deliveries to confirm an address, as it wasn’t clear. # served = 5, total # = 9.

– There were around 20 drivers, with partners with them. As they arrived, we assisted them with getting their delivery slips, helping them to find their addresses as needed, and then having them all hang out, as we continued to wait on the hot food delivery. By the end of my shift, I had served each of the drivers and their partners. # served = 40, total # = 49.

– Once the hot food finally arrived, then it was go time. I was assisting the people in the back room, which is where we were dishing up the delivery meals. There was about a dozen in that room, so I was doing what I could to serve, whether it was going back to the kitchen to get more food, directing traffic within the room to keep the volunteers on task, getting boxes ready or whatever else. # served = 12, total # = 61.

– Then the main thing that I was doing was directing traffic with the drivers. While we were waiting for the hot food to be delivered, I had them pick up their packaged pies, so that part was already done. Then as the hot food was being dished up, I was coordinating with the drivers as to how many meals each of them had to be delivered, and helping to get all of their meals into boxes so that they could be on their way. So, in the end, because I was helping each driver to be on their way with their food, I was also really serving all of those recipients too. As I had had the master delivery list when we were setting up the routes, I know that we had at least 240 meals that were being delivered, as some were added by phone calls after we had setup the original routes. # served = 240, total # = 301.

– In addition, because of my activity with helping to dish up the pies to begin with, we also had 128 people next door in the senior center that we were serving meals to. # served = 128, Total # = 429.

In the end, I had served more people in that one day than I ever believed possible in one month or a quarter. More than 429 people were touched by my efforts that day, which just blew my mind, so I may need to hold my intentions to be open to an even higher number going forward, now that I can conceptualize how it could realistically happen.

I’m grateful to have learned that lesson that day.