HELPCA is an initiative for the Community, made possible by the Community. But how does it work, concretely? How does a typical delivery day look like and who do you find behind the scenes? 🤔
Every week, a family makes its home available for the packing, opening its doors to a small group of people; staff members and volunteers, packers and deliverers. The crew takes the place over for the whole day while hundreds of products are spread in the inside and the outside; occupying every single inch of space in the three-rooms first floor and in the covered courtyard that have been previously cleaned and disinfected 🧹
At 10 a.m., it’s time to get busy. Delivery trucks arrive on site, loaded with orders collected from suppliers and the volunteers enter the scene. In warm conditions, wearing mask and gloves complying with the sanitary protocol, they unload the trucks and store the products in the places assigned to each vendor. Then follows a long morning of packing. Each volunteer prepares the orders of ten or more customers. It takes lots of concentration to verify that each product is included in the package, to ensure the freshness of the fruits and vegetables and the accuracy of the quantity ordered - by weight or by unit 🍆🥒🥕
Obviously, to err is human. And when an ordered product is missing, HELPCA will always try to find a solution. Sometimes that means going digging into the order from a volunteer or staff member, or driving to a nearby supplier to pick up the missing item. - “Maria ordered 30 eggs and she got only 12. We will need to sacrifice your eggs Zulema, I’m sorry” - “I’m not sure this is a liter, and I know what I’m talking about, I’m a bartender!” - “Some of these bottles don’t have a label…” - “This box has no name on it… I don’t know who has ordered that” . . .
Eventually, around 2:30 p.m., when all the orders have been reviewed, it is time to load the trucks again with the final packages that will be brought to the pick-up points 📦
So, on behalf of the Community, THANK YOU to Ana, Andrey, Valejo, Nina, Zulema, Ryan, Noilyn, Keilor, Elegido, María, Leidy, Josue, Ailyn, Selectah… HELPCA would not be possible without your presence and motivation every week. THANK YOU! You are the ones who make all this happen! 🙏🏻 💪 🤗
#Community #supportlocalbusiness #organic #sustainable #alltogether #volunteering #helpcacrew #thankyou