As some of you know, Karma Kitchen has been on pause since the beginning of this year due to an unexpected change in ownership of the restaurant. 

Over the last 9 months, hundreds of volunteers spent 8 hours of Saturday night to provide generosity experiences for thousands of diners.  It was an overwhelming success by any metric, but as we collectively reflect on the many exciting possibilities that are now open to us, we are learning from the many salient lessons.

In particular, we experienced four stages of sustainability in this chronological order:

• Financial Sustainability: in essence, we were renting out the restaurant for the night, and if we didn't make the rent, the experiment would be over.  CharityFocus was ready to front the losses for a year, but ultimately, we saw that we were more than able to cover our costs every week and that people are indeed generous if you trust them to be so. :)

• Process Sustainability: given that we rely solely on volunteer resources, we have to strive for efficiency in every direction. :)  We tried all kinds of rotations and restrictions and menus, for about 4 months, until we found a rhythm that worked elegantly within the restaurant.  A big part of this was also streamlining the off-site coordination and data management; and leveraging the CF backend and technology was crucial in this regard.  Having a team of bright people made this happen a lot sooner than it would've otherwise. :)

• Outreach Sustainability: ultimately, we need to people to come to the restaurant!  It was a brand new restaurant, somewhat hard to find, and often without easy parking.   In the later months, once the momentum is built, it was much easier; the hardest part was the early days.  This, however, ended up being our greatest strength.  Courtesy of many gift-economy events and Wednesdays, we had a list of several thousand local people who were willing candidates to become our amplifiers; Rev. Heng Sure was a big part of this as well.  Without any media pitches, we were able to "keep it real" and still attract full houses; after 6 months, we naturally started attracting media stories and in our 9th month, we had six media inquiries!

• Volunteer Sustainability: it took 100 volunteer hours to put on one night of Karma Kitchen.  Initially, we had about 40% of that, and we had to use our hustle-and-bustle to make it happen. :)  Over time, as we proved the concept and people benefited from the volunteering experience, that number grew to 70%.  My sense is that if we continued for another 6 months, we would've hit full sustainability on this end.

As it stands now, there are several restaurants vying for bringing Karma Kitchen to their restaurant.  Each offering has its pros and cons, but it's a good issue to have. :)  Will keep you posted as more develops.

All gift-economy projects are unpredictable, because they rely on so many subtle conditions; so, who knows what happens this time around, but it surely promises to be a fun ride. :)