One of the things we often do as a church community is provide meals for people, especially when they are going through sickness or have suffered a bereavement.

Sometimes this can be a quick informal thing, especially where this person is part of an active small group or has a good community around them already. At other times this needs more structure or would benefit from some sort of rota (especially where ongoing support is needed).

Rotas Are Complicated
Putting together a rota can be hard work. If you are doing it manually, it involves contacting a lot of people and duplicating a lot of information - if there was a way to do this online, wouldn't it be simpler? 

One of my friends in Zimbabwe posted about a friend of theirs who had recently suffered a bereavement and asked her facebook friends if they could contribute to the meal rota. They were using a website called "take them a meal". Even though I knew I couldn't help because I'm on a different continent, I took a look at the site as I was interested to find out how it worked.

Simple yet Effective
It's a very simple site, you can add as much detail as you like to help those planning a meal. Those who can help, register their name & contact information on the appropriate evening, everyone knows immediately which evenings are taken and which evenings still need to be organised.

Draw Backs
The only draw back is that the site isn't secured so data can be accessed if you publish the url online.
The people behind the page recommend you only send the link via private message on Social Media to avoid this problem.

The site will automatically email the details for you if you add email addresses to the list or you can send your own email using the link information out to a mailing list for example.

Its a very simple way of organising a meal rota, online. I really like it - may be you can use it too!

For more information visit: www.takethemameal.com