What Takeout 25 taught me about the power of community
Takeout 25 started with an argument.
It was November 2020. COVID cases were rising, indoor dining had shut down again, restaurants were struggling, and our community was increasingly divided. Restaurant owners were desperate and my favorite breakfast place, George’s decided to stay open. Residents were worried about public health. Social media quickly settled into the familiar pattern of people choosing sides and shouting each other down.
I remember thinking that neither side was completely wrong. Restaurants needed to survive. People needed to stay safe. Instead of choosing between them, I wondered whether the community could accomplish both. My consulting background forced me to seek solutions and I turned to basic math. If 10,000 households spent $25 a week ordering from local restaurants, we could generate roughly $1 million a month in local restaurant spending. That was it.
Spend $25 a week. Order takeout. Help keep our restaurants alive.
I posted the idea on Facebook without much expectation of what would happen next. People responded. They invited neighbors, posted pictures of meals and discovered restaurants they had never tried. Restaurant owners joined the conversation. Volunteers stepped forward. Within weeks, thousands were participating. Something that started as a mathematical equation was becoming a community.
That taught me my first important lesson: people often want to help, but they need to believe their individual action matters. The pandemic left many of us feeling powerless. None of us could reopen the economy, end COVID or rescue every struggling business. But most of us could order dinner. Takeout 25 connected that small action to a larger outcome.
The second lesson was simplicity. We could have created a complicated program, raised money and decided how to distribute it. Instead, residents spent directly with restaurants. No application. No intermediary. No bureaucracy. The $25 mattered, but perhaps more important was that everyone understood what to do. I've come to believe that many good ideas for social change fail because we make participation too difficult. If you want thousands of people to act, an important question is: How easy is it for someone to participate?
Then something happened that I hadn't anticipated. Food became a social lubricant. People weren't joining a Facebook group to discuss economic development. They were talking about tacos, sushi, pizza and biryani. They recommended favorite dishes, celebrated restaurant owners and discovered new businesses. At a time when people were physically separated, food gave us something positive to share.
That led to another lesson: community grows around relationships, not causes. A cause may bring people together, but relationships keep them there.
We learned that positivity mattered too. There were plenty of places online to argue about COVID, politics and everything else. Takeout 25 needed to be a place where people could participate without being attacked or judged. Positivity wasn't about pretending problems didn't exist. It was a design choice that made collective action possible.
Trust mattered just as much. As Takeout 25 grew and money, partnerships and nonprofit activity entered the picture, transparency became essential. People needed to understand who was behind the effort, where resources went and whose interests were being served. Community can't scale without trust. Perhaps the biggest surprise came from the restaurants themselves. Businesses that traditionally viewed one another primarily as competitors began collaborating. Sharing problems, ideas and sometimes resources. Competition didn't disappear. But community created room for cooperation alongside it.
Five years later, Takeout 25 looks very different. What began as an emergency response has expanded into sustainability, food security, restaurant support and experiments with technology. But the most important thing Takeout 25 changed may have been my own understanding of community. I used to think of community primarily as something you belonged to, a neighborhood, town, organization or group of people with something in common. I now think community is something we build. We build it when people see a problem as shared rather than someone else's. When participation is simple enough for everyone to contribute through trust, positivity and relationships. And when small individual actions become meaningful because thousands of others are acting alongside us.
Takeout 25 started with $25 and a Facebook post. What it taught me is that the most powerful resource in a community isn't money. It's the belief that, together, we can do something none of us can do alone.
Further reading: If you'd like to explore the full story behind Takeout 25 and the lessons it taught me and how you can apply them. I share that in my book, The Takeout 25 Effect: Mobilizing Community for Positive Change.