The Wednesday meal started in 2011 because someone noticed the same four people waiting outside the library every afternoon. It was going to run for a winter. It has now served something over twenty-eight thousand meals and it has never missed a week.

I want to write down what we have learned, because most of it is not obvious and some of it we learned the hard way.

Do one thing, and do it on the same day forever

The single most important decision we made was Wednesday. Not the menu, not the room, not the funding. Wednesday.

People who are struggling are managing an enormous amount of uncertainty. A thing that happens every Wednesday, whatever else is true, is worth more than a better thing that happens sometimes.

Do not ask questions at the door

We do not ask what anyone believes, or why they came, or whether they need it. There is no form and no register. This costs us: we cannot tell a funder how many of our guests are in housing need, because we do not know.

We decided that was the right trade. The moment you ask a question at the door, you have made a threshold, and the people most in need of the meal are the most sensitive to thresholds.

Feed the volunteers too

For the first three years the volunteers ate afterwards, standing up, in the kitchen. Turnover was terrible and we could not work out why.

Now everyone eats the same food at the same tables. Guests and volunteers are not visibly distinguishable, which was an accident and has turned out to be the point.

A woman who came for eighteen months as a guest is now on the rota. Nobody marked the day it changed. There was no day; there was just a Wednesday when she started carrying plates.

Expect it to be boring

Fourteen years of Wednesdays is not a story. It is a rota, a supplier, a cleaning schedule and about sixty people who have quietly rearranged one evening of their week around it.

The volunteering that sustains is almost always the unglamorous kind. If you are looking for something that will feel meaningful every time, this is not it. If you are looking for something that will still be here in ten years, it might be.

What it costs

• About £280 a week in food, most of it donated
• Six people on the rota each week, four hours each
• One person who owns the whole thing and does not get a week off

That last line is the real cost, and every project like this has it. If you are starting one, work out who that person is before you begin, and then work out who relieves them.

If you want in

The rota is on the notice board and there is always room. You do not need to cook. Half the job is washing up and the other half is sitting down with a plate and talking to whoever is next to you, which is harder than the washing up and matters more.