Serving A Basic Need
The Serve are a local Hamilton community-led group who dedicate their services to helping those in the community who experience food poverty.
Billie Dell has been a volunteer for The Serve since October 2020. In her own words, The Serve “is a charitable trust set up to feed people in Hamilton who experience food poverty or simply would like kai”.
“A couple saw a need and just started feeding people and it progressed from there,”
Billie says she joined The Serve because she wanted to help people meet a basic need and it’s worth her time and effort to do it.
“I expressed my interest on Facebook, attended training, and chose a night I could help based on their need for volunteers and frequency of serving”.
The Serve has “a board of trustees who work directly with the other volunteers”.
Volunteers are assigned roles such as cooks, servers, greeters and coordinators. Billie has been trained as a Meal Service Coordinator. In this role, she is in charge of managing a team of volunteers consisting of servers and cooks every second Friday evening. Her team usually involves three cooks/servers and they serve around 30 people each night. The Serve doesn’t only cater to the homeless. The Serve also caters to men, women and children of all ages who sleep rough, stay in emergency and/or transitional housing or need company.
During Covid, The Serve had fed an additional 5,000 families a week on top of their usual nightly routines. Billie said that it generated a “concern of not having enough meals for people and not having enough volunteers to cook’. Fortunately, The Serve pulled through and managed to get the community a full stomach.
When asked about what organizations partner with The Serve, Billie said that there are many, namely, “Heretohelpu, Kaivolution, MSD, Hamilton’s Men’s Shelter and more”. Just as these organizations have partnered with The Serve, and volunteers offer their time and effort to do their part, there is always room for more.
Martin Luther King, Jr said, “Everybody can be great because everybody can serve”. As members of the Hamilton community, we can do our part and volunteer with The Serve to make sure that all of our communities are well-fed.
For more information about The Serve or if you would like to volunteer, visit theserve.org.nz and follow their Facebook page.
