Meal Plans.

So, for some stupid reason I volunteered to take over the construction of meal plans for Lily's school, where the families themselves prepare a healthy and hopefully delicious meal for all kids. I think I accepted because the woman who was in charge before is a) a friend of mine, b) very active in the school and taking over a different, more important position, and c) because I don't trust anyone else to get this right.

We're 7 days from starting school, and I just received the list of the kids. We have 4 groups of kids/families, and each group has one family preparing each day, so we have around 15 servings to prepare per family. Luckily, we created a recipe book, so we don't have to juggle the recipes into the mix of information anymore, which is good, because people get confused quickly.

Of course, the groups are not equally distributed. We have 47 kids at the school, one group of 13, one of 12 and two of 11 pupils. That, so far, is manageable. Some just have to prepare a little more often than others.

But then the teachers want to contribute, too. But only for the soup day, because they don't want to cook, but only bring ingredients, which is the case for soup days. Meaning, we have add them to the mix, too, but only on special days.

Okay, still manageable.

But some teachers have children at the school, so I have to see to it that they're fairly treated, too. Which shouldn't be too much of a problem, apparently their function as a teacher is separated from that as a parent, so I don't have to be too considerate with that.

Then, some families have two kids in the school, which is great. But some of those families want to cook only on one day with their kids in different grades/groups, so I have to align them. Others don't want to cook twice the amount, so they want only on two different days.

Head spinning yet?

All that revolves around a particular school calendar that includes events that contain their own meals, which of course isn't marked in the calendar as such.

Got it!

Looks more or less like this, without the names yet. Now, on to the recipe book. Which was a big hot mess when I got it. Yes, the recipes where all there, but random parts were headlines, a lot of spaces that shouldn't be there, lists that were and lists that weren't... And so on. I'm still working on that, and it will be awesome. With hyperlinks and everything.

Why am I doing this?

Especially when starting out in a new community, I tend to give it all. I go all in, put myself into service - because that's what I would want from others. In my ideal community, everyone chips in as I do, which still leaves room for non-community activities of course. But everything gets done, nicely, and in time.

It's later that I start to pull back. When I see that it's not reciprocal, that there's a big unbalance between the maximum and the minimum input. I don't stop entirely, and I don't drop down to a minimum, but I usually land somewhere a little above the average.

Never going down to their level.

Exploiters are in every community. It's inevitable, even in those with quite straight values as Lily's school. Some have excuses, some don't and don't even try. We had a kid drop out of school because the family decided that they had to be involved too much with the school. They had to care for the education. It wasn't just a place to drop off and pick up. And no, not a money thing, they had a scholarship.

Guess in what section of community input they were...

I have to set healthy limits. For the time being, I'm still a single parent with a business to run, and on top I'm trying to extend that business in a way that will benefit others more than me, but will bring me great satisfaction. Meaning: I'm busy. Still, I'll do my part, and probably carrying a little of other peoples' parts, too.

Trying to be the example.

As always. The better I become, the more aligned with my values, the better I will feel and the more impact I might have on the community, each of those I participate in. My thoughts evolve a lot around that lately. I'll probably write another post about it, soon. Until then - thank you for reading.

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What are your thoughts about this topic? Please feel free to engage in any original way, including dropping links to your posts on similar topics. I'm happy to read (and curate) any quality content that is not created by LLM/AI, as well as read your own experience and point of view, I love to learn!