What serving food at “Trinity Cafe Nebraska” taught me about agility and humanity

A few months ago, I started offering volunteer hours at Feeding Tampa, an organization dedicated to providing food for the homeless and people with compromised economic conditions. I volunteer at Triniti Cafe on Nebraska Street in Tampa on Saturday mornings. We serve a nutritious breakfast to approximately 200 people in one hour, from 9:00 to 10:00 am.

My motivation was to give back to the community, something that I enjoy as a privileged person; I consider that food is essential for any other activity in life, and Feeding Tampa’s organization seemed ideal.

However, after several weeks, I feel that Trinity Cafe has given me more than I have given myself in terms of learning about the human condition, empathy, compassion, and, surprisingly, agility and teamwork.

The team at Trinity cafe behaves like an agile team, with servers, hosts, bussers, scrapers, cooks, dishwashers, and security. There are 12 tables, and depending on the number of volunteers available, two servers are assigned per table, then they alternate the functions of server and host; Food is essential, but the conversation is also meaningful.

I know that Bussers’ work is hard because I’ve done it several times. There are three bussers to clean the stalls of the people…