Changing The Fabric
Imagine being 17 and handing over your phone.
Not for an hour. Not for a class period. For eight whole days.
Do you think you could be that disconnected?
That’s how every trip begins for the students of Rooted in Nebraska, a youth leadership group from a small town of 30,000. Ten miles outside of town, the phones are collected, and just like that, the noise stops. No scrolling. No group chats. No idea what’s coming for their day in the next hour, let alone tomorrow.
And something amazing happens in that quiet: the group starts to wonder again.
“When you have your phone, you never wonder,” says Jason, one of the adult coordinators of the trip. “You just ask.” It really is this practice of being present and reflective.
When Jason was speaking about the impact of the trip, he reflected on all the trips Rooted has taken. On a past trip, the group played Uno and laughed so hard their stomachs ached the next morning. The students realized that back home, they’d never played cards without a phone nearby. They are always half present, half somewhere else. This was different. They were different.
Each year, the trip is built around a message shaped by the needs of that year’s group of students. This year, the message drew from the book The Four Levels of Happiness: the idea that lasting joy isn’t found in taking care of only ourselves, or in winning, but in service to others and our community.
The group joined Mel, our Site Coordinator, in the work she does every single day: preparing 300 to 400 free meals for our guests at the St. Matthew’s Community Meal Location. Coming from a town where the local shelter serves only a handful of meals each week, their eyes went wide. Then they got to work. Three of them washed grapes for two hours straight. Taking on 300+ meals is no easy challenge.
Mel shared why some neighbors eat quickly; many arrive by bus after a long day and need to catch the next one home. A few students sat with a woman over her meal and quietly realized and reflected later how much she reminded them of their own grandmothers. Earlier in the trip, while handing out hygiene kits in Minneapolis, they met workers with full backpacks and tool belts, heading home from a hard day’s work, who gladly accepted one. Every assumption the students carried about who faces barriers to food access gently started to come undone.
“True service is not reaching down to someone,” Jason says. “It’s the realization that they are you and you are them. I’m no better than anyone else. I am just lucky for the cards I have been handed.”
Jason believes that if you teach a handful of students that service matters, you can change the fabric of an entire community. Rooted has an interesting approach to service: they invest in students at a pivotal turning point in their lives. Jason’s take is this: “You don’t come to Rooted to make a difference. You come to Rooted to be different.”
Yes, they fed 400 people that day. But, as Jason puts it, they didn’t change the world; they worked to change themselves: how they see others in their community and the personal confrontation of even the deepest prejudices ingrained in our lives.
At Loaves & Fishes, we believe the thread that holds a community together is this: Every one of us is one turn of circumstance away from a different experience. We don’t believe you should have to show proof of need to not go hungry. When we’re truly present with one another, the lines we draw between “us” and “them” quietly disappear.
That’s why we serve free meals to anyone, no questions asked.
There’s a place for you at this table, too. Come serve alongside neighbors like Mel at one of our FREE dining sites across Minnesota, or if you can’t be here in person, a gift of any size helps set the table for millions of meals to be served to our neighbors who join us each year.
Learn more about Rooted here >
It was so fun to get to know Jason and the team at Rooted. If you want to share your story with Loaves & Fishes, we’d love to hear it. Send your story to our Communications Manager, Mary, at mfranz@loavesandfishesmn.org.
