I’ve been thinking a lot about how we should cope with the fact that demand is higher than what we can currently serve (I will make another big post about what we can do to increase capacity…)
Our two options are:
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serve repeat orders first, and take on new people as capacity opens up. Once people are in, they’re in and get a meal every day for the foreseeable. This is better for the people in that cohort. It also makes it easier for our drivers. In practice that’s basically what we’re doing.
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aim to maximise the number of people served by capping it at a meal every other or every third day, or a similar method. This is harder for everyone but reaches more people.
I’ve given it a lot of thought and I support the second option. We’re not capable of being a dependable daily food service for many people, if at all. Perhaps some people will really rely on getting a meal every day, and this option will hurt them. But what we want isn’t to sustain a hierarchic relation where we provide someone’s every dinner, but to seed & develop mutual aid as a horizontal social relation. That means reaching as many people as possible to influence them with the ethics of mutual aid, and working with other groups to increase the capacity of the whole system.
I suggest we try to agree some way to implement this by the start of next week. How do people feel?
