She’s Changing the World, One Lasagna at a Time

When the pandemic hit in 2020, like most people, Rhiannon Menn wasn’t prepared. The mom of three felt frightened, overwhelmed, and hopeless in the face of the unprecedented panic we all experienced in early quarantine. To fight off this deluge of stress and anxiety, Menn made a small decision that snowballed into something huge: She impulsively posted in some neighborhood Facebook groups, offering to drop off extra homemade food for families in need. 

What happened next was a touching display of genuine human kindness: Many members of those local groups reached out and asked if they could cook and deliver hot meals, too. At the same time, more families emerged to accept this warm gesture from the community. Soon, Menn had amassed a network of helpful cooks excited to support families in need. She quickly began building the infrastructure to support volunteers outside of her area — and eventually, she had the tools to bring Lasagna Love to the whole United States.

Lasagna Love carries on the simple, heart-warming approach that began in Menn’s kitchen: You sign up online, get paired with a family in your area, and deliver a homemade lasagna to their home as frequently as you wish. In other words, it’s the perfect noodle-based display of generosity for passionate home cooks who want to facilitate neighborly connections. 

To get more details on this cause, we caught up with Rhiannon Menn to chat about what it takes to manage a country full of do-gooders who want to change the world, one lasagna at a time. Menn also explains what it takes to give back to your community. (Spoiler alert: A big heart is pretty much the main requirement). Plus, we have all the details on how you can sign up to start using your home cooking skills to help others.

Tell us about Lasagna Love got started.

I like to call Lasagna Love a wonderful, giant, accident. I remember standing in my kitchen in March 2020 when Covid hit, feeling completely helpless and trying to find a way to support families in my community. I decided to start making meals for strangers, so I posted in a couple of local moms’ groups on Facebook, saying my toddler and I were making extra food, and if anyone was struggling — no matter what that struggle looked like — to let us drop off a home-cooked meal to their doorstep. It turns out there were a lot of people feeling like I did, and moms started reaching out to me, asking to help. I just kept saying “yes” to anyone who asked, and I suppose I just said yes enough times, because here we are three years later, and we’ve fed 1.5 million people.

Lasagna Love is now a full-blown movement: Tell us more about the community of volunteers you’ve built across the country.

Just the other day a man shared how he came to Lasagna Love — a friend of his told him that she was a volunteer, and his first reaction was utter shock. He said, “There are people who need this near us?” Her response was, “You have no idea.” So he started making and delivering meals, and discovered a side of his community that he had been completely unaware of. I can’t tell you how often that happens.

We have volunteers who are 7 and who are 70. There are parents who use Lasagna Love to teach generosity to their kids, retirees who are thirsting to be more connected to their communities, folks who see giving back as a way to heal themselves, empty-nesters who miss cooking for others, and everyone in-between. What binds our community together is a genuine desire to help others during their hour of need — to share a moment of kindness. It’s truly inspiring to hear their stories each day. 

I remember one recipient sharing that she’d worried about judgment when she requested a meal because even though they were struggling, her family looked “OK” from the outside. She said, “There was no judgment, no questions asked, just home-cooked hearty food that nourished us.” Our community is made up of people who recognize that it takes courage to ask for help, are willing to give it with zero judgment, and feel genuinely grateful for the opportunity to impact another family.

When Lasagna Love started, it was just you. How did you turn the idea into a full-fledged nonprofit?

When I started this, I had no inkling of what Lasagna Love would become. To me, it was just a question of how I would feed as many families as possible, and what I needed to do to make that happen. I remember during the summer of 2020, my husband and I were taking a family vacation in a camper van across the country. We would be in these beautiful settings — nestled on a lakeside campground in Georgia, driving through the fall foliage in the Rockies of Colorado — and I would be sitting outside under a tent with my laptop, an extra monitor, extension cables tangled everywhere, often wandering around with our portable wifi trying to find enough signal. It certainly wasn’t the family trip my husband had pictured, but he did everything he could to support me. 

At some point, I realized it needed to be more than me if we were going to be able to keep going. So I asked for help — which ironically was very difficult for me — and the outpouring of support was unbelievable. Volunteers stepped up to manage their local areas, friends connected me to friends to help with professional services… It was the beginning of our volunteer leadership model, which to this day is how we operate. We have a very small core team of staff, and we rely on individual donations of $25 or $100 from people who hear about us, and that helps to keep our core team going. Then we have more than 300 volunteer leaders supporting everything we do, from local volunteer management to social media to customer support and more. It’s part of how we’ve been able to stay so efficient, and why our donors love us — our operating budget is about 2%  of our total revenue (for reference, a “great” rating for a nonprofit is usually 15% or less). 

One might’ve thought this would be temporary, to help people navigate through the pandemic, but Lasagna Love is still going strong.

We set out to feed families in a time of need, but what we’ve realized is that the power of what we’re doing is so much more than putting a meal on the table. For these families that we deliver to, we’re restoring their faith and their hope: Their faith in their community’s desire to be there for them in a time of need, and their hope for a world where the driving force is authentic kindness. A woman I shared a lasagna with two days ago broke down in tears right in front of me. Her expectations of her community are so low, that the idea that another human would reach out and offer something from the goodness of the heart was entirely unfamiliar. So many people feel alone in their struggles, they feel forgotten, they feel ashamed to ask for help because they’ve been taught — or they’ve been shown — that asking for help is a weakness. We’re not just feeding families, many organizations can do that. What we’re able to do is inspire genuine hope, connection, and human kindness, and that has the power to transform communities.

How are you navigating your new role as an unexpected entrepreneur raising three small kids? And what advice would you give other parents in a similar situation? 

I could write a book to answer this question! I actually found out I was pregnant with my third child right as Lasagna Love was taking off. So I was navigating parenting two little ones, plus pregnancy, plus being an unexpected entrepreneur trying to keep pace with something that was going viral. It’s so easy to get caught up in the whirlwind of what’s happening as an entrepreneur that I think what was helpful for me was to make space, both in terms of time and mentally, to really think about my own core values and my own goals. As a mom I want to spend so much time with my kids, but as the leader of an international nonprofit, I want to positively impact as many families as possible. So I’m always looking for balance.

Some part of finding that balance comes from my own reflection, some of it comes from conversations with my husband, and some of the wisdom comes from connecting with people who’ve walked this path and hearing their stories. And in terms of advice, I’d recommend that any parent who’s also an entrepreneur make sure you’re still doing things to take care of yourself first. For me it’s exercising, eating well, drinking enough water, and making sure I’m connecting often with my mom. Those are the things that fill my cup, but this list will look different for everyone. I’ve found that every time I let something fall off — usually the exercise and hydration go first — I’m not able to bring positive energy elsewhere. Not to my family, and not to Lasagna Love.

My second piece of advice would be to make time now, and then at least once a year, to sit down and write out your 1-, 3-, 5-, and even 10-year goals. If you have a partner, I highly recommend that you do this together. The last time my husband and I did this, my goals were to write a book, start a podcast, and grow the number of families we feed by 100%. My husband’s goals were to pull back from work and do a lot of family travel in the next few years — it’s easy to see how those goals might be at odds. Knowing those differences gives us the power to navigate it together. This kind of communication — especially when one person is pushing hard as an entrepreneur — is unbelievably important.

This is a great example of how social media can be used for good. Tell us more about the “network effect of kindness.” 

Lasagna Love was born entirely on social media, which is unbelievable when you think about it. It’s particularly interesting because of this ongoing conversation around how social media is driving polarization and creating disconnection as people replace in-person communities with online communities. 

But we’ve seen people come together across all of the divisions you typically see represented in your Facebook or Twitter feeds. Our volunteers are from every religion, every background, and every political view — including the wives of two prominent senators from opposing political parties. They represent every socioeconomic status, age, gender… you name it. And these wonderful people are coming together because for them, kindness supersedes any differences we might have. Kindness has been at the foundation of our work since my very first delivery, and it has persisted as a core part of our mission. We even have core values that every volunteer signs onto, once when they become a volunteer and again when they ask for membership in our global Facebook group. Each person commits to being empowering, positive, zero-judgment, and empathetic. Imagine if that was true across social media?

It’s unfortunately true that some online communities target individuals emotionally to make them withdraw from others — they build on fear and anger. But because our community is formed on the basis of kindness, we do the reverse. We offer a space where emotions — empathy, joyfulness, sadness, passion, grief — are encouraged, in order to connect with others through shared purpose and vulnerability. And through the power of that shared purpose, we’ve been able to build an international community working together to provide for our neighbors.

Tell us about paying it forward, and how it applies to Lasagna Love. 

The idea of paying it forward is that the recipient of a kind deed, rather than giving back directly to the giver, instead “pays it forward” by showing kindness to others. There have been quite a few psychological studies looking to understand why it happens, and most of them come to the same conclusion: it has to do with the feeling of gratitude. People who feel grateful are more likely to help others. 

Well, Lasagna Love inspires a lot of gratitude. And I started to hear anecdotal stories of our recipients paying it forward in their own communities. I remember the first, a gentleman who reached out to me after receiving a lasagna. He was so moved by the kindness of the volunteer that he decided to pay his neighbor’s heating bill, and this was the middle of winter. I sat there re-reading his note just thinking, This is incredible. If there’s one person that took the time to reach out and tell me, how many more people are quietly doing something similar? So we decided to see just how much kindness we were inspiring beyond the initial delivery: We reached out to some of the recipients of the 350,000+ lasagnas that we’ve delivered, and what we saw was astounding. It turns out Lasagna Love actually works to create a network effect of kindness, starting with our 40,000 volunteers. 98% of our recipients say they’ve been inspired to pay it forward, and about one quarter of those recipients had already done something to pay it forward within a few days of receiving their meal. One went grocery shopping for an elderly neighbor. Another donated an entire storage unit worth of stuff to a stranger she saw in a Facebook group who had lost her home to a fire. Many shared their lasagna with someone else they knew who was in need. The list goes on and on.

We don’t know exactly how far our volunteers’ initial acts of kindness ripple, but one study from UC San Diego and Harvard suggests that the pay-it-forward concept continues up to three degrees of separation. That’s a lot of kindness inspired from one lasagna delivery, and it’s this ripple effect that we believe has the power to truly transform communities.

How can people reading this get involved?

To anyone who’s reading this and feeling inspired, we would love to have you as part of the Lasagna Love community. If you like to cook and have the time, you can sign up to deliver meals to families in your area. If you don’t like to cook or don’t have the time but want to help us reach as many families as possible, you can donate monthly instead of making meals. Every $25 helps us reach 100 more families, so your donation goes a long way. You can learn more and get involved at lasagnalove.org.