I’m looking for suggestions and input regarding how your team handles meals during build season.
Do individuals provide their own food?
Is there a schedule for parents to provide food?
Do parents contribute money for food?
Do you have a schedule? A minimum number of times each family provides meals?
Do you have arrangements with local restaurants for discounts?
I’m the mom of a student. Last season I noticed that there were a 3-4 parents who provided food on a regular basis. Sometimes the mentors were buying food for the students! :eek: It doesn’t feel right that these Mentors who are already dedicating so much time should also be buying food.
We have a team of about 30, but mostly there’s a core group of 10-15 that stay late during build season. If anyone has any great forms, procedures or suggestions, I’d really appreciate it. Thank you.
Our parent boosters have several folks who step up lead activities throughout the season to support the team. One is organizing our build season meals. Dinners during the week and Lunch on Saturdays. Later in the season and on School holidays it can be both lunch and Dinner.
The parent boosters setup a list in Sign-Up Genius for the meals. They have a recommended list of meal options that are simple, easy to prepare and travel well, but they are only suggestions. Sign-Up Genius is nice in that it shows what days are available and also sends an email reminder to the parent in case they forget. We have a fridge at our facility for leftovers. The attempt is to get every family to donate a meal, if they can not than the boosters ask for a $100 donation in order for someone else to provide the meal or to order pizza, subs, or other.
We have parents bring dinner on Monday, Thursday, and Friday. They bring lunch on Saturday, if we stay late enough that dinner is needed everyone is on their own and we typically take a break for people to leave to get food. On Tuesdays we order pizza that the kids are responsible for paying, as that is our weekly full team meeting and we have too many people to feed that we don’t want to burden the parents with.
We have a sign up sheet that parents fill out during our parent meeting on the morning of kickoff. We typically tell them they are going to be feeding around 30 people.
Apex 5803 meets 4 times a week during build season. The three weekdays (M, T, Th) we have parents sign up to bring dinners. On Saturdays at the start of the season we meet from 12pm-6pm and it’s expected that students will have had lunch before they arrive and dinner after they leave, but we do have parents sign up to provide snacks. As we get later in the season and start Saturdays earlier and ending later, we ask parents to help provide lunches and/or dinners then too.
We’re a fairly small team (13 students last season) so parents usually end up bringing 2-3 meals over the course of the season.
We ask a parent to volunteer to be the meal coordinator and handle all the signups so the coaches/mentors don’t have to handle that on top of everything else. It works great, and we find it really helps get the parents engaged and invested in the team as well.
We usually have parent signups to bring something each Saturday during build season for lunch. Which is about 7 meals. It is usually a main course (chicken n noodles is popular, pasta, etc) side dishes, desert, and drinks. Other times the students are essentially responsible for their own food.
See if you can get more parents to help. Its great when more parents get involved with the team and see what we do.
Last year we met 9-3 on Saturday, and would have parent(s) bring some food for lunch, coordinating it on one of our slack channels (#mealplan). There were definitely overachievers and underachievers, but there were quite a few who provided at least once and no one considered it a problem. This year we’re moving back to a noon start time, with the meeting/eating room opening up around 11:00-11:15 so people can bring a lunch and get coordinated at the beginning. This way, the only “team meals” we will need are for kickoff, any holidays we meet, and when we extend hours as we are likely to do around weeks 3 to 5.
Our school runs until 4pm, so we start weekday meetings at 5, which is enough time for most of the students to get dinner beforehand (gas station, two pizza places, Dairy Queen, Burger King, Church’s, grocery store with deli and more within half a mile), and for a few mentors to show up as well.
Edit: Previous years, we just had a lunch break, but clobbered productivity much more than meals being brought in. We were also able to get a bit of light-duty coordination done during the provided meals.
My team asks parents to provide 2-3 meals during the season. Since there isn’t a cost for our team we ask the parents to provide the food as we need food everyday. We also have a fridge near our workshop so we can save leftovers.
On our team each family signs up for a lunch or dinner. They have the choice on what to bring and many bring food from their own culture. This has been a great education for our students as we have a very diverse team. They get to try food they would never have had otherwise. Each meal must have a vegetarian option and we also must take into account food allergies. One year we had food from 9 countries represented and some multiple times.
Parents bring dinner (we’re after school till 7-10 at night), and lunch on Saturdays. If a parent doesn’t bring dinner it’s not uncommon for someone to make a break for Costco or Ralphs (or a pizza joint), or the team heads for the nearest places to eat (see also: Taco Bell). Primary requirement is that there be a vegetarian option, other than that it’s whatever the parent feels like bringing.
During offseason everybody’s on their own, unless someone fires up the grill.
We create a paper sign up sheet and pass it around on kickoff night to the parents (while students begin game analysis). I then type the signups into a Google Sheet and email parents reminding them of their signups and showing the slots still available. A few times during build season, we send reminders to sign up for open slots. It works out most of the time but when there is nobody signed up, we just order something like pizza or sandwiches and have everyone chip in whatever it costs on that night.
We only provide food for lunch on Saturday since during the week we finish by 6:00pm. A few times during the build season families will volunteer to bring food for lunch but most of the time our lunches are provided by some local businesses. The local KFC, Subway, and pizza place are the most common providers during the season.
We use a Sign-up Genius as opposed to paper…it is free to use…www.signupgenius.com
We have used this to include our parents as an integral part of the team. They bring the food in, set up the meal and clean up afterward. We feed around 45 people Monday,Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday, as well as holidays during build season.
Our Parent Booster club goes to local businesses to see if they can get lunch donated or provided to us at a lower cost. We only need to have meals arranged for lunches during our Saturday meetings, so there typically isn’t a lot of planning that’s needed. Our students pay a flat fee for their shirts and 7 build season meals at the beginning of the season to offset the cost of meals. We only do pizza if we need to stay late to get some extra work done beyond our weekday 3-6 meeting.
In the case of my team, we do it like many others. We create a sign-up and send it out to all parents. we put on mentor in charge of making sure, no matter what, our team has a meal. In most cases it works, but we have trouble later in the season, and especially on spontaneous meeting days. In those cases, it’s usually pizza. This is one of the big things we try to keep parents in charge of.
Last year our team created a culinary department on our team. The students cook meals in our Family & Consumer Sciences to serve to team members. This department is also in charge of our fundraiser that revolves around a meal along with other tasks.