Serving at the food pantry teaches you that people aren’t projects. They’re neighbors with names.

Helping from a distance lets you keep people as a category. Up close, the category turns into a person with a name, an opinion about tinned beans, and a life that was running before you arrived and will carry on after. That shift is the whole education, and it tends to make you less certain about what other people need. Nobody wants to be somebody’s good deed.

Wherever you volunteer this month, make it your business to learn two names and use them. Ask a question that has nothing to do with why the person is there. Let that be the entire interaction, with no follow-up plan for them.