Volunteering can be an intimidating prospect, especially if you’re new to the practice and don’t know what to expect. Do you need to prepare anything? What kind of tasks will you do? Will it actually make a difference for whatever cause you’re lending your time and talents to?
Allow us to ease your volunteering inhibitions.
Forgotten Harvest only exists at the scale it does because of volunteers. We welcome around 80 or more generous individuals to various volunteer opportunities daily, and we strive to make the process as easy as possible from sign-up to show-up.



Our ranks range from long-term, should-be-tenured-by-now volunteers to first-timers on any given day, and each one tends to leave more connected with their community than when they arrived—something we could all use a little (or a lot) more of these days.
Volunteering at Forgotten Harvest gives you a closer look at the issue of food insecurity in our Metro Detroit community: what it means to be food insecure, who food insecurity affects, and what solutions are at work to alleviate its burden. Getting involved this way naturally expands your empathy for those impacted. As a result, the entire web of care in our community is reinforced.
Not only will our whole community benefit, but giving back gives you a boost in feel-good spirits yourself.
Don’t just take it from us. For this post, we interviewed two volunteers, one of whom has helped shape Forgotten Harvest for more than a decade and one newer to our organization, to gain their perspectives and share their experiences. We hope it takes some of the unknowns away from volunteering, and encourages anyone with “volunteer more” on their New Year’s Resolution list to take the (short, safe, padded) leap.
Building Care and Empathy
Rachelle Brown, lovingly dubbed “Super Volunteer,” has been contributing to Forgotten Harvest’s work and mission since around 2009. After being cut from her job in human resources, leadership, and diversity training and development with Yazaki North America in the aftermath of the 2008 recession, Rachelle’s mentor and a former board member of Forgotten Harvest nudged her toward our organization.
She offered her HR expertise to rewrite our employee manual as the organization grew and new laws had to be followed. “From there, I began to gain interest in the organization as a whole. I was very excited,” Rachelle told us. “I saw what they did and loved the mission as I still do today.”

Even after reentering full-time work, Rachelle still made time to volunteer with Forgotten Harvest. She was in constant advocacy and outreach for our organization, helping to grow our volunteer program throughout the Metro Detroit area along with our staff. Today, our Community Choice Market often sees her and the women’s groups she’s a part of coming in to make sure our neighbors get the groceries they need.
“Being an executive who was cut from her job, I recognize that any moment at any time, you don’t know who will need food assistance,” she said. “It drove me back because I wanted to let others know, even those who work and are struggling to stay above water, I wanted them to know there was a place they could go to get assistance.”
Forgotten Harvest serves hundreds of thousands of our neighbors every year, each with their own unique circumstances bringing them to us. Many are employed but their income isn’t enough to cover all the basics. Others have gone through a change in their household composition and now have to care for more loved ones than before, or are dealing with unexpected medical bills or the rise in grocery prices.
Our volunteers are the reason those neighbors can access the food they need. “It allows people to lay their pride aside when they volunteer. It helps them understand that it takes a lot for people to come through there looking for food,” Rachelle told us.

Gratitude in Giving Back
Giving your time to a cause you believe in also allows you to reflect on all the help you’ve been given in your life.
Stephen Moore came to Forgotten Harvest’s volunteer program through his own gratitude. A Wayne State University student, Stephen was facing a complicated issue he needed help making sense of. The Wayne County Treasury Office offered him comprehensive assistance from top to bottom which emboldened him to extend his own helping hand.
“I was grateful and I asked what I could do to express my gratitude. I was told one way I could do that is by paying the help forward,” Stephen shared. “They pointed me to Adrian Lewis [Forgotten Harvest’s CEO] and they said to spend some time volunteering with Forgotten Harvest. I was happy to do it!”
As a former Kroger employee who saw our grocery rescue partnership play out in real-time from Kroger’s shelves, Stephen enjoyed seeing the process from the other side. It felt good to join a group of people in a shared community all focused on tackling a local problem.
He told us, “It was easy for us to pick up and work together with the instruction we got. It was a cool experience, and at the end when we got to hear what we were able to accomplish by working together in that way, it was a nice feeling.”
During an average grocery rescue volunteer opportunity, a group can sort more than 10,000 pounds of nutritious food for our community. It sounds like a lot, but with 30-40+ people contributing to the work, it’s easy. When you consider how many families you’re helping put food on the table for, it’s even easier.
Stephen said, “I think we could all recognize that there are a lot of people who really are in need and stand to benefit from some type of help. I see volunteering at Forgotten Harvest as…it really doesn’t place a demand on you. You show up for a little bit, it’s an inviting and fun atmosphere. To have all of that and still be helping someone in a really meaningful way, I think is really cool.”

Your Turn?
Over 550,000 Metro Detroiters struggle with food insecurity, sometimes or often going without enough food for their families to make ends meet elsewhere. Forgotten Harvest has been working to offer relief for 35 years, distributing millions of pounds of nutritious food for free each year—none of it is possible without volunteers.
If you’ve thought about volunteering with Forgotten Harvest but haven’t found the time, or if you’ve been with us before but haven’t joined the sort line in a while, check out our volunteer page for open opportunities! We promise it will feel good to join your neighbors in helping your neighbors.