The Secret Ingredient Was Never in the Recipe
One of my favorite questions people ask is, “Why does Lasagna Love work?” It’s funny because the answer usually depends on what I was doing five minutes before you asked me that.
If I just walked out of an operations meeting, you’re probably going to hear about matching algorithms, volunteer capacity, dashboards, and all the moving pieces that somehow come together to get thousands of homemade meals to the right front porch each week. If I’ve been buried in budgets, I’ll probably start talking about stewardship and sustainability. How every donated dollar has a job to do, and how we’re constantly asking ourselves how to stretch it just a little farther without ever stretching the heart out of the mission. If it’s after a board meeting, you’ll probably hear me talking about five years from now. What kind of organization we’re becoming. How do we grow without losing ourselves? How do we protect compassion while building something that lasts?
If you catch me after spending the morning reading Lasagna Chef stories…well…pull up a chair! We’re going to be here for a while. Somewhere around story number four, I’ll be waving my hands around trying to explain how one front porch can restore your faith in humanity, and you’ll probably forget what the original question was. (Trust me… it happens.) The interesting part is that every one of those answers is true. And none of them are wrong. They’re just looking at Lasagna Love through different windows.
I started noticing this a few years ago.
I’d spend my morning (and sometimes into the afternoons) looking at operational reports. Numbers. Maps. Wait times. Volunteer coverage. By lunchtime I’d be reading a message from a lasagna chef who had just completed their hundredth delivery. That afternoon I might jump into a meeting about technology. Then finish the day answering an email from a neighbor who finally worked up the courage to request a lasagna after sitting on the website for three weeks. Same organization. Completely different worlds. And it hit me…everybody thought they were talking about something different. Operations. Technology. Fundraising. Communications. Programs. Community. But they weren’t. They were all describing the exact same movement from where they happened to be standing. That realization completely changed how I lead.
It’s a little like standing in front of a stained-glass window. If you’re close enough to touch it, you notice the individual pieces. The deep reds. The blues. The tiny imperfections in the glass. Step back twenty feet, and suddenly those same pieces become a picture. Neither perspective is wrong. You simply couldn’t see the whole thing from where you were standing. Lasagna Love is a lot like that. Every Lasagna Chef, every donor, every neighbor in need, every Program Ambassador, every Regional Coordinator, every member of our staff, every partner and every board member. Each one is holding a different piece of the glass. And every piece matters.
For a while, I thought the secret has to be hidden somewhere in the systems. If I could build better technology…If we could improve communication…If we could shorten wait times…If we could create better reporting…Surely that’s what made this movement work. So we’d improve something. And things got better. Then we’d improve something else. And things got better again.
I absolutely love that part of my role in the big magical ride. Probably more than I should. My team can confirm.
But later on I realized something that stopped me in my tracks.Every improvement helped kindness travel farther, true. However, none of them created kindness in the first place. That part was already there. I think that’s why people sometimes ask me what the “secret sauce” is. They’re expecting me to point to the portal. Or our volunteer community. Or the matching process. Or maybe a leadership philosophy. And Honestly? It’s all of those things and yet none of them. The thing holding it all together isn’t a process.
It’s trust.
Not the kind of trust you build with one grand gesture. It is quieter than that. The kind that’s built the same way friendships are. It’s a conversation, a promise kept, a person showing up when they said they would, a homemade lasagna. Then another. Until one day you realize…I trust these people.
That’s the part I wish everyone could see.
Every week, thousands of complete strangers trust one another. A nighbor spends part of their weekend making dinner for someone they’ve never met and another opens their front door to receive it. If you stop and really think about that…It’s pretty darn incredible! Especially in a world that constantly reminds us to be careful. Lock your doors. Don’t answer unknown numbers. Don’t click suspicious links. (Seriously…don’t click suspicious links.) Yet every single week, people choose to trust anyway. Maybe that’s why this movement gives me so much hope. Not because it proves the world is perfect. We are far from that. Because it reminds me that underneath all the noise people still want to believe in one another.
So the next time someone asks me why Lasagna Love works…I’ll probably still answer differently depending on which hat I’m wearing. Because every one of those hats teaches me something. Operations reminds me that kindness deserves good systems. Finance reminds me that generosity deserves good stewardship. Communications reminds me that stories carry hope farther than statistics ever will. Volunteering reminds me that people are capable of extraordinary compassion.
But when I take all those hats off and when it’s just me sitting at my kitchen table when I have a few quiet moments I always come back to the same thought.
The secret ingredient was never in the recipe.
It was in the thousands of people who decided to trust one another long enough to discover they had been neighbors all along.
Until next time,
