Spreading Lasagna Love, Volunteering & Making New Friendships!

In today’s post, I’ll look back on the times when we first moved to Calaveras County, became homeschoolers, and didn’t have any friends. We felt sort of lonely here and the feeling was daunting to me. A year and a half into living in the country and being homeschooled I can assure you that the picture is not looking so sad anymore. We are making new friends, organizing local events, volunteering, and even… spreading Lasagna Love.

Today I will tell you about a few ways we made new friends in the past year, and became more social and involved in our community.

Volunteering at Columbia State Park

When we first moved out to the country, we didn’t know anyone or what was where. We were new to the area, and I guess you could say, we were kind of lonely (at least it felt like it to me). It wasn’t just the fact that we moved to a place away from all our friends and everyone we knew, but we’d also just started homeschooling. We spent a lot of time at home.

For me, it seems like everything started skyrocketing the day we visited Columbia Historic State Park. We have volunteered in a few of their events and through being a part of this awesome community we made some friends and even became a part of a Book Club.

Organizing Community Meetups

Since becoming Docents we also started hosting weekly hikes that my mom calls “Trails & Friends”.

We invite other people from our community to join us on hikes. Since we started doing it we made a few good friends thanks to this event. On some days people come and join us, and on some, it’s just my sister, mom & I walking and talking. We created this event because my mom likes to hike and she says we all need more movement and time outdoors. So, it’s a win-win situation when new people join us and we connect and become friends.

In January we also organized a Community Vision Board Meetup and we had a bunch of our friends (and even new people we never met before) show up and dream big & create with us!

Making vision boards is a super fun, creative, and colorful way to plan goals and dreams. You cut out pretty and inspiring pictures and phrases from magazines and newspapers and then you glue them on a whiteboard to serve you as a visual reminder of your goals through the year.

There was this one time, a few years ago, when I was making a vision board… I cut out a random orange car and glued it onto my board. That same year, my mom got an orange car that looked exactly (and I mean EXACTTLYYY) like the one on my vision board!! Freaky stuff, am I right?

Lasagna Love

During one of our hikes, we met Leslie, a published author!!! I think Leslie is very cool because she retired at 34 and I feel like I can learn some things about being good with finances from her. She recently published a book and this also inspires me because I want to be an author. She loves cooking, just like us, and we sometimes meet at her house to bake, cook, and play Rummikub.

She introduced us to amazing 3 ingredients homemade flatbreads and another very cool way of being involved with the community: Lasgana Love.

One day, when we were hanging out at Leslie, she got an email with a request to donate a lasagna to a family of 11 people. She quickly told us about this program she signed up for called Lasagna Love – a website where you can sign up to provide home-cooked lasagna to a family in need (based on your area). Or you can sign up to receive lasagna.

A few days later we were back at Leslie’s house cooking 32 servings worth of lasagna. We made some for us, some for Leslie, and the rest for the family in need. After we made it, we also delivered it.

Lasagna Love was founded by a woman named Rhiannon Menn during the pandemic. When families in her community were struggling, she made their days a little brighter with some lasagna! Since founding Lasagna Love, she has encouraged over 45,000 other volunteers to do the same. Thousands of homemade lasagnas are being delivered to neighbors from awesome neighbors in three different countries!

It was my very first time making lasagna and I think we did a great job!

Friends Don’t Come To You, You Have to Come Out and Find Your Friends.

If you ever struggle to make friends because you moved to a new area, changed schools, or are a little shy in general, feel free to use our experience as inspiration to change that. Life is always better with friends!

👍🏻 Don’t be afraid to organize your own events, even if only one person shows up. Because hey! That one person might just become your best friend for life!

👍🏻 Use your own interests and hobbies to organize these events, so you make connections with people who have similar interests as you!

👍🏻 Find local events in your community to participate in and volunteer with.

Just remember that when you are trying to make new friends most likely you will have to get out there and find them because friends will not start showing up from nowhere. I hope I gave you some inspiration on how to go about it.

Resources from this blog post

1. Columbia State Historic Park
2. Trails & Friends – this event is open to everyone who can join us in person! Right now you can sign up for updates via this page.
3. Lasagna Love
4. Leslie’s Book