For most teens, meal planning is a skill as finely honed as cleaning their room or waking up early.
So it’s not surprising that a proposal Marilee Stark gave a while back to the director of Midrasha in Berkeley was greeted with a decided degree of trepidation.
Stark, a parent who coordinated the youth program’s monthly meals for the homeless, came up with the idea a couple of years ago of turning the entire administrative job over to a handful of kids.
That meant lining up volunteer cooks and servers, finding people to make desserts and making sure everyone did the required jobs for the dinners, which are served regularly to some 50 needy men at a downtown Berkeley shelter.
Stark, a former high school teacher who is now a psychologist, was spending a couple of hours each month coordinating the meals.
“I thought, ‘Wait a minute. Why am I doing this? They could do this,'” Stark said.
“I know what these kids can do. If you give them responsibility and give them structure, they can do this.”
But three years ago, when Stark floated the suggestion to Diane Bernbaum, the director of Midrasha in Berkeley, a Judaic studies program for high school students, “she was actually pretty hesitant. I said, ‘Look, just trust me. I’ll be right behind them.'”
Recalled Bernbaum: “It seemed that it was a complicated task even for an adult to coordinate. But Marilee is a therapist who works with teens, and I trust her judgment.”
So Midrasha decided to give the student-run meals a try. Now, dozens of dinners later — and after a few bumps early on — the program by all accounts is going without a hitch.
It’s running so smoothly, in fact, that the teens decided two years ago to serve twice-monthly meals at the Dorothy Day men’s shelter on Berkeley’s Center Street.
“I thought we were being really ambitious,” admitted Gabriela Kipnis, one of the five student coordinators of the dinners. “It’s worked out fine.”
Bernbaum describes the student team as “very responsible” and notes that the teen-led effort has been a great learning tool and confidence builder. “They realize that they’ve got hands-on organizational skills that they probably didn’t know they did.”
Added Stark: “I think the kids have a lot of pride in what they do. They pull this off.”
This month, Kipnis and two other teens are graduating and preparing to head off to college. But they’re turning the reins over to experienced replacements to make sure the program continues.
“It’s pretty solid in its routine,” said Mollie Wolf, a 17-year-old junior at Berkeley High School who will be one of the new student leaders. “I’m pretty confident with it.”
Though Wolf doesn’t plan any dramatic changes in the system, she wants to recruit more students to handle the shopping and cooking chores directly. Currently, that task is done by teams of parents and their children.
“We really want to get classes or groups of friends to get involved,” Wolf said. “It’s an awesome opportunity to go do something good with your friends.”
With 275 participants in the Midrasha program, finding volunteers to prepare the meals generally hasn’t been a problem, the teens say.
“At the beginning of the year, it’s not very hard to find volunteers,” said Kipnis. “People have room in their schedule.”
But during holidays and other busy times of year, “it can be up to three hours of phone calls to find the volunteers,” she added.
Amelia Post, an 18-year-old graduate, said there were a few times, like on the last night of Passover, when she needed to do some last-minute baking because she was unable to find anyone willing to make dessert.
Besides getting people to supply dessert, the students make sure they find someone to plan the menu and shop. They also need two to three families to cook, serve, sit down to eat with the residents and clean up.
There are calls to remind volunteers about their responsibilities and often, last-minute calls from volunteers with logistical questions.
Still, for Kipnis and others, “it’s been really satisfying.”
Whenever she’s worked at the shelter, “it’s one of those things where you really feel you’re making a difference,” Kipnis said. “I’ve been able to ensure that Midrasha families are going out and having a similar experience.”