Value of a Shift at Ballard Food Bank

...358 days to go...

Jen and I have been volunteering at the Ballard Food Bank (BFB) on and off for a number of years, so it felt right to start my journey there. In total, I’ve completed 34 volunteer hours there so far, which my volunteer dashboard helpfully tells me have an “impact value” of $1,152. The implication is that my time is worth about $34 an hour, which makes me kind of feel bad about charging clients $750 for that amount of time as a management consultant. Apparently I’ve been overcharging them a smidge. But what impact does my time at BFB really have?

I should probably start by describing what BFB actually does. It describes its mission in simple terms: “to bring food and hope to our neighbors”. It does this through a few different programs:

• Community Market: A completely free grocery store offering fresh produce, prepared foods, frozen items, canned goods, personal care, and more. The market also includes a “no cook” department with ready-to-eat items for clients without a kitchen.

• Kindness Cafe: A restaurant, providing meals and a warm, dry place to eat daily. I’ve tried several of the meals and they are delicious and healthy: for instance, white bean pesto salad with asparagus, or orzo salad with chicken and feta.

• Weekend Food for Kids: A service for kids who receive much of their calories at school, to ensure they don’t go hungry at home.

• Community Resource Hub: Connections to resources clients may need beyond food. These include case management, financial assistance, mail and computer access, and referrals to other organizations.

One thing I love about BFB is that volunteers really ‘power’ the organization in the sense that almost nothing could get done without them. Volunteers pick produce at the Food Bank Farm, drive delivery trucks that collect food from local supermarkets, sort incoming produce into types like tomatoes, squash, and apples, bring food from the warehouse into the community market, and bag food for clients at checkout. There’s an enormous amount of labor required for all of this: over 40,000 hours in 2024 alone, spread across over 1,600 volunteers.

I find it gratifying to think about the amount of food distributed to our neighbors per hour of volunteer time spent. The community market distributed 4.5 million pounds of food in 2024. If we assume about three-quarters of the volunteer hours support the community market (30,000), that works out to about 150 pounds of food per volunteer hour, or 450 pounds per three-hour shift. That’s a lot of grub! At about a pound and a half per meal that’s 300 meals, or enough food to feed 14 people for a week!

Some of my former consulting colleagues would no doubt argue that much of the ‘value’ of that food came from donors (either of food or money). Hopefully they won’t send me a bill at consulting rates for their efforts, but they’d be right, of course. Quantifying the value of volunteer time is always going to involve some mental gymnastics, because getting food into stomachs requires both donations and volunteers.

One thing I can say for sure: everyone volunteering at the food bank seems a lot happier about the work they’re doing than the average Amazonian is. While working a produce sorting shift last week, I was paired with 4-5 other volunteers. Each of us threw ourselves into the work whenever a truck rolled in, trying to sort the fruits and vegetables before another truck pulled up and created a backlog. The smiles and can-do attitudes were contagious. Somehow, it seemed clear to each of them how much value was being created by their work.

Is this the right way to think about the value of a volunteer shift? Let me know in the comments.