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Comment by ants_everywhere | Hacker News Reader

As someone who's done a lot of volunteering at soup kitchens and such as well as things like public policy research, my take is exactly opposite.

Typical soup kitchen volunteering is pretty low impact. It's the first thing a lot of people think about when it comes to volunteering, and people like that they get to interact with the less fortunate. So they show up with their church group a few times, ladle some soup and that's about it. Running a soup kitchen is different and higher impact.

The things the UN is doing matter to millions of people. If you work with the UN food program, you're dealing with food by the truck load instead of by the spoonful.

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Completely agree. The important corollary to that is that policy, in many cases, matters a lot more than boots on the ground (obviously good policy and manpower together are usually required).

I've volunteered with a prominent animal rescue charity for over 2 decades. While the work does require a lot of people, after you do it long enough you quickly realize bad policy is a giant contributor. For example, Texas is the only state in the US where it's illegal for shelter vets to do care on animals unless the animal is fully surrendered: https://www.humananimalsupportservices.org/blog/why-cant-vet... . So there are a lot of poor people who can't afford vet care, and then their only option is to surrender the animal at a shelter, where in many cases the animal may be euthanized. If your goal is to reduce the unnecessary killing of pets in shelters, fixing this policy is worth like thousands of volunteers.

I recently had an experience at a soup kitchen. It was my first time in an entirely new group and new place. Naturally I found that everybody only interacted with each other - the volunteers, not the people lining up for food. I realised it was more like a social gathering but there was a clear divide between the volunteers and the people getting the end product. In that sense I'm not really sure that soup kitchens do much besides allow a surplus time of the more fortunate to gather socially together for a pro-social benefit (hard to see if it's actually pro-social for those consuming the food).

> I'm not really sure that soup kitchens do much besides allow a surplus time of the more fortunate to gather socially together for a pro-social benefit

You say this like it is a bad thing, which confuses me

They’re arguing along the lines of “it’s not the /better/ thing I envisioned”, rather than a “this is good” baseline.

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