(L to R) Sheena Smith, Flor Avellaneda, Christine Hersh and Marianne Magjuka celebrated the grand opening of Baylor University Campus Kitchen earlier this year. The students were four of the more than 40 BUCK volunteers, who made 1,000 box lunches for volunteers working on the Martin Luther King Day of Service. (PHOTO/Baylor)
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WINSTON-SALEM, N.C. (ABP) — As the new school year begins at colleges and universities across the country, students at two historic Baptist schools are taking Jesus’ command to feed the hungry and quench the thirsty quite literally.
Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, N.C., and Baylor University in Waco, Texas, are feeding their local communities through the Campus Kitchens Project. The initiative is an effort by students to keep extra food on their campuses from going to waste — and to challenge the very roots of malnutrition in their communities.
According to the group’s website, there are 20 schools across the country that have started their own Campus Kitchens chapters. Students coordinate the redistribution of leftover food from dining halls to those in need.
The chapter at Wake Forest has been serving since 2006. According to Shelley Graves, the kitchen’s coordinator, in that short time approximately 1,200 volunteers have worked to serve meals in the Winston-Salem community. Graves said student volunteers work in donated kitchen space and help serve 350 to 400 meals per week, Sunday through Thursday, to a number of local organizations that serve the disadvantaged.
“Students are really the ones that are running the program from day to day,” Graves said. In fact, she noted, the program’s volunteer spots are very popular among Wake students.
A local middle-school student enjoys a whole-wheat grilled cheese at a nutritional talk led by Campus Kitchens Wake Forest. (PHOTO/Melissa Duquette)
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Andy Ronan is one of those student volunteers. A business major in his third year of volunteering with the project, he serves as a member of the chapter’s executive board. He heard about the project through a friend, and then started volunteering on an individual basis before organizing a group from the Catholic campus ministry. They now serve meals regularly.
Ronan described the program as a “great link” between the university, its surrounding community and local charities.
He admitted that it is often easy to become “very sheltered” living on the campus of a school like Wake Forest — even for someone who, like he did, grew up in Winston-Salem. However, Ronan said, his experiences volunteering with Campus Kitchens have “helped me to see that right outside of our campus there are people that live such different lifestyles.”
In helping their local community, Ronan said the student volunteers benefit as well. The project is “just as much a service to us as the people we deliver meals to … [it] enriches your week,” he said.
Graves, a Wake alumna, points to her own faith and background as influential in her motivation for serving through Campus Kitchens. “A lot of my drive for service came from the fact that I grew up in a family [in which] service was not only a good thing to do, but a requirement,” she said. Graves is now ministering in her own way, following in the footsteps of her parents and her grandfather, all ministers.
Graves said the student volunteers come from a diversity of faith backgrounds. Although Campus Kitchens is not a faith-based organization, she said the Wake chapter tries to emphasize that serving others is a responsibility — and that the people they are serving are “not some abstract group … they are real human beings.”
Students Helen Woldemichael (L) and Demetria Williams (R) volunteered their time to help Baylor University Campus Kitchen (BUCK) with its grand opening earlier this year. (PHOTO/Baylor)
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The Campus Kitchen at Baylor is just beginning its first full year of service to the Waco community. It is one of the two major initiatives of the Baylor Interdisciplinary Poverty Initiative (BIPI). According to Gaynor Yancey, a BIPI faculty coordinator and a dean at the Baylor School of Social Work, the project gets faculty, staff and students “all concentrated on the fact that poverty is one of the major issues in the world.”
The Baylor kitchen was born from a project in Yancey’s advance practice class in the social-work master’s program. “What would normally take a year to a year-and-a-half, my class did in three-and-a-half months,” she said. The process taught the students how to start an organization and included breaking the class into teams, with each team functioning as would a team in a real-world organization. The teams had a plate full of tasks ranging from working with the university, administration, and local food service, to being trained as safe food handlers, writing grants and organizing volunteers.
Their work paid off when the kitchen officially started on Baylor’s campus last Jan. 17 — the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday. On that day alone, volunteers served 1,000 boxed lunches at nine different sites to people who were marking the day by serving their community.
Like the Wake Forest kitchen, the Baylor kitchen is student-driven. Last semester, Yancey said, the program had around 350 student volunteers.
One of this year’s student volunteers and leaders is Anna Imose, a junior who serves as the student coordinator. Her responsibilities include all of the planning, scheduling and paperwork — including a monthly report to the national office of Campus Kitchen.
Campus Kitchens Wake Forest University encourages volunteers to use their creativity put thoughtful touches on the food they prepare like this football cake. (PHOTO/Melissa Duquette)
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This year, Imose said, the Baylor chapter will continue to prepare one full meal a week to be served at a local organization. They will also be taking food that can’t be stored to the Salvation Army, which serves three meals every day of the week.
To Imose, her role as a student coordinator is about more than just serving food. “You realize how important food is,” she said. “I never realized how much of an influence it has…. [I] learned that in the simple thing of feeding people they are more willing to listen to you … open up to you … it opens a door that I never thought was possible.”
Campus Kitchens’ mission goes beyond simply feeding people, though, to include teaching them about healthy eating and living. Christine Hersh is Baylor’s kitchen manager. A nutrition-sciences major, she acts as the chapter’s nutrition coordinator as well. Her job is to take the reclaimed food and decide how to make nutritious meals out of it, along with running the kitchen and making sure food-safety standards are being followed.
This year, the Baylor kitchen will be partnering with a local farm to incorporate locally grown produce into the meals. “[I am] very excited about bringing that nutrition into it,” Hersh said. The Wake Forest chapter will also be adding this element to their own kitchen through a campus garden.
Like Ronan at Wake Forest, Hersh said her experiences volunteering have helped her to see the need in the local community surrounding campus. “It has enabled me to see beyond the ‘Baylor Bubble’ … it really opened my eyes to what the need is out there and how much food we waste — or would have wasted if we threw away this food from the dining halls.”
In the case of Baylor and Waco, it’s a community that could really use the help. According to Yancey, the small Central Texas city has a 27.5 percent poverty rate among adults. “Baylor is a part of the Waco community … this is something that we can all get involved in,” she said.
Outside of serving food and providing nutrition education, both Baylor and Wake Forest’s kitchen projects encourage students to sit and eat meals with the people they are serving. Yancey described the program as “not just a thing of serving food, but building relationships … sitting and talking with people over food, over a meal is one of the most effective ways to build relationships.”
In her opinion, Yancey said, breaking bread and getting to know someone over a meal is “something pretty biblical.”
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Melissa Limmer, a Baylor alumna, recently completed a summer internship with Associated Baptist Press.