Our Volunteers

All Open Table activities are completely staffed by volunteers.  Our volunteers provide transportation for some guests, plan and prepare meals, shop for food, pick up food from corporate donors, make table decorations, staff the food pantry, and serve dinners.  They also provide for special events at holidays and for children.  Volunteers do all the fundraising, bookkeeping, and administrative tasks as well, contributing a grand total of over 7000 hours of volunteer service in a year!  Our volunteers range from schoolchildren who help with food drives and table decorations to grown-ups who contribute their cooking expertise. 

There’s a place for you as a volunteer at Open Table. To learn more, please call us at 978-369-2275.

Volunteer Experience

Being a volunteer at Open Table means many things to many different people.  Planning and shopping for each week’s dinner, preparing dinner, setting tables, serving dinner,  clean up and more clean up, stocking the pantry, transporting all the items that Open Table needs each week, showing a friendly face to someone who may need it, being available to listen to guests and fellow volunteers – all of these things contribute to the experience of being a part of the Open Table family but none of these activities explains the experience completely.  To volunteer at Open Table is to be part of   community of friends that comes together to share a meal.  Think of it as your dinner table, except that you have 100 or more guests coming to dinner each week!

Each Thursday night, Open Table looks lovely – happy guests having dinner at tables decorated with centerpieces, complete meals for all, and take-home for those who can’t stay or arrive late.  And the panty is another great experience – food for guests to take home for the days until the next Open Table dinner.  At the end of the evening, volunteers go home tired, hoping that guests go home satisfied, both in body and in spirit.  But behind the scenes of each Open Table dinner is a virtual army of volunteers without whom the experience of OT would be different – and less. 

For instance, many of us are unaware of the planning that goes into each dinner.  Each week, the menu planner tries to come up with an interesting, tasty and nutritious dinner, based both on availability of food and seasonal needs.   Who needs pot roast in July?  Not Open Table – our menu planners try to fit the meal to the weather.  And that’s not easy when you’re planning a week ahead.  Add to that the various tastes of our guests and you see what we’re up against.   Shall we have hamburgers for the kids or something more interesting for the grown-ups?  Will everyone like the zucchini or is broccoli better?  But zucchini is on sale!  Decisions, decisions.  Somehow, it all turns out well and sometimes better than well – great!  Like the delicious fruit salads that may appear on a hot summer evening or the warming lasagna served on a freezing January night. 

Our volunteer family includes many folks that guests may not ever see – especially our transportation volunteers who collect the food for the pantry, transporting it from donors and vendors to the pantry headquarters on Everett Street and to the church.  Other pantry volunteers pack the bags each week and transform the Tuttle Room into a bustling place to chose produce, meat, bread and other food supplies. Also working behind the scenes are the youth volunteers who often provide centerpieces for the tables, bake special items for dessert, or help clean up after guests have left.  Clean up is a major task at Open Table and a special thank you is deserved by all those who help in that department.

All the volunteers deserve thanks but being a part of Open Table has its own rewards and those are not to be found by a thank-you in an annual newsletter.  Those rewards are the simple conversation between volunteer and guest, the warm feeling of knowing a child has been shown what it means to help out in a larger community, the good feeling of preparing food for someone else and seeing that person enjoy it.  Those are the rewards of being a volunteer at Open Table.

Imagine you’re cooking for a family of four.  Now imagine that your family has invited 150 or more guests to join you at your table!  That’s the scenario for Open Table every week in Maynard and Concord.  Open Table happens because volunteers put in over 7,000 hours of volunteer service over the course of one year.  If you’re looking for an enjoyable and rewarding volunteer experience that can truly make a difference, consider Open Table.  We ask only for a commitment of a few hours each month and can offer a variety of volunteer positions.  Please contact us at 978-369-2275 (OT Concord) or 978-823-0082 (OT Maynard) and leave a voice mail message telling us you are ready to volunteer.