Listening First: What a Feedback Form Taught Me About Community
By True DePaoli, 2026 SHECP Intern with Bread for the City
Bread for the City is a nonprofit that provides DC residents with food, clothing, healthcare, legal services, social services, and more. All of the services are committed to serving people with dignity and respect. I worked within the Social Services department, and from the very first day, I was learning and helping community members feel supported.
Over the summer, I split my time between the Northwest and Southeast locations; both had their own rhythm and regulars. I learned quickly that the best part of this work was the people. I started learning names and their stories. By the end of my first week, I was already using my French and Spanish to communicate with community members who did not speak English as their first language, translating instructions on the spot and watching the relief on their faces when they realized they were understood.
The workshops themselves were one of the greatest joys of my summer. I helped run different workshops, including job readiness training, trivia, yoga, boxing, painting, and my personal favorite, Garden Club. There was something especially meaningful about watching people work together to grow something. The community members would come to me to ask when the next events were happening.
As the weeks went on, I started to feel something shift. I was not just showing up and helping anymore. I was contributing ideas, taking ownership of projects, and thinking more critically about what we were doing and why. I redesigned intake forms that cut our onboarding time significantly. I built Excel spreadsheets to help track participant data more clearly. I helped create the August programming calendar, coordinating directly with facilitators across both locations to confirm scheduling and implement new changes.
But there was something that had been sitting on the team's to-do list for a while: an anonymous participant feedback survey. Everyone agreed it was a good idea. No one had quite gotten around to making it happen. I kept thinking back to something I had learned in my entrepreneurship course at Furman: never assume what people need. Ask them directly. And I thought about the fact that we were planning programs and scheduling workshops, but I was not sure how much of it reflected what participants actually wanted versus what we imagined they wanted. Those two things are not always the same.
I decided to design a simple paper form with a mix of multiple-choice and open-ended questions and proposed it at our department meeting. I introduced the survey at a painting class one afternoon, left it on a table with some pens, and walked away hoping for the best. When I came back to help clean up, twelve out of fifteen participants had filled one out. Their responses were specific, thoughtful, and full of ideas for programs they wanted to see.
By the end of the summer, more surveys had been completed, and they had also been translated into Spanish and Mandarin so we could reach even more of our community. I also created a digital version so the team could continue tracking responses after I left. Watching something that had lived on a to-do list for months transform into a real, multilingual, functioning tool was one of the most rewarding things I had done that summer.
On my last day, community members brought me going-away gifts. Some of them spoke about the impact I had made on them. The custodians surprised me with a bouquet of roses. And I left knowing that the most valuable thing I gained this summer was not a skill I can list on a resume; it was the understanding that real community work starts with listening. Showing up, learning names, asking questions, and genuinely caring about the answers. Everything else follows from there.
True DePaoli is a Business Administration Major on the Entrepreneurial Track and a Poverty Studies Minor at Furman University, graduating in December 2026. During her 2026 SHECP Internship, she worked with Bread for the City's Northwest and Southeast locations in Washington, DC. Each summer, SHECP interns are placed with nonprofit and government agencies that work on the front lines of poverty and serve as co-educators to students.
