Introducing Camp Second Helpings — This Summer, Earn Your Patches

Volunteering at Second Helpings has always been more than showing up and putting in hours. It’s learning where food comes from and where it goes. It’s understanding the full arc of a meal, from a rescue pickup on the north side of Indianapolis to a plate at a shelter on the east side. It’s meeting the people who make it all happen and becoming one of them.

This summer we’re taking that experience to a whole new level.
Introducing Camp Second Helpings, a summer-long volunteer adventure that launches June 6. Whether you’ve never set foot in our building or you’ve been chopping vegetables with us every Tuesday for three years, Camp Second Helpings was built for you.

So What Exactly Is Camp Second Helpings?
Think of it as a summer of exploration with some serious incentives attached.
Every time you volunteer at a new station at Second Helpings, you earn a patch for it. Each patch represents a different corner of our operation, a new skill learned, a new team met, a new piece of the mission experienced firsthand. The goal is simple: try as many stations as you can, learn everything there is to know about Second Helpings, and collect every patch you can earn before summer’s end.
It’s part volunteer program, part scavenger hunt, part summer camp, and entirely worth your time.

What Kinds of Patches Can You Earn?
Second Helpings runs on many moving parts, and Camp gives you the chance to experience all of them. Here’s a taste of what’s available:
Veggie Patch — Earned by working vegetable prep in our Hunger Relief kitchen. If you’ve ever wanted to know what it takes to prep produce for thousands of meals, this is your station.
Tilt Skillet Patch — Earned by working our industrial tilt skillets alongside our Hunger Relief chefs. Fair warning: it’s a workout!
Driver Patch — Earned by riding along on a food rescue route, picking up donated food from businesses and bringing it back to our kitchen or delivering meals to our community partners. This is where the rescue part of food rescue happens.
And SO MUCH MORE!
Each patch is a badge of honor, proof that you showed up, learned something new, and contributed to the work in a meaningful way.

Who Is Camp Second Helpings For?
Camp Second Helpings is designed primarily for adult volunteers. If you’ve been volunteering at the same station for a while and have been curious about what else goes on inside our walls, this is your invitation to find out.
If you’ve never volunteered at Second Helpings before, Camp is a fantastic entry point. Instead of settling into one role and staying there, you’ll get a guided tour of the entire operation through the act of doing it yourself.
Families are absolutely welcome to participate as well. The more the merrier, and the more patches earned, the better.

What Else Can You Expect This Summer?
Camp Second Helpings isn’t just about patches. Throughout the summer we’ll keep things lively with prizes and raffles and other surprises along the way — We’re not giving everything away. You’ll have to show up to find out.

An end-of-summer s’mores ceremony is the proper end-of-camp celebration complete with an awards ceremony to honor everyone who explored, earned patches, and gave their summer to fighting hunger in Central Indiana.
This is the kind of summer you’ll actually want to tell people about.

Why We Built Camp Second Helpings
Second Helpings runs on volunteers. Last year alone, hundreds of volunteers contributed thousands of hours to our Hunger Relief kitchen, food rescue operation, and beyond. Without them, the 1.3 million meals we prepared and delivered last year simply don’t happen.
But here’s something we’ve observed over the years: many of our most dedicated volunteers have only ever experienced one piece of what we do. A regular Tuesday chopper may have never seen the inside of a food rescue van. A longtime sandwich maker may have never stood at a tilt skillet. And that’s completely fine, consistency and reliability are exactly what we need.

Camp Second Helpings is our way of saying: there’s so much more to see. The more our volunteers understand the full scope of the mission, the more connected they feel to it, and the more powerful their contribution becomes.
We want you to see all of it. We want you to do all of it. And we want to celebrate you for it at the end of the summer with s’mores and a patch collection that tells the story of your summer.

Ready to Sign Up?
Camp Second Helpings kicks off June 6. Spots are available for both new and returning volunteers.
See you at camp.