WINSTON-SALEM, N.C. (ABP) — 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 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.
Baylor University School of Social Work graduate student Flor Avellaneda (right) and fellow students work on preparing food for the Campus Kitchens project. (PHOTO/Robert Rogers/Baylor University)
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According to the group’s website, 20 schools across the country have started their own Campus Kitchens chapters. Students coordinate the redistribution of leftover food from dining halls to people in need.
The chapter at Wake Forest has been serving since 2006. According to Shelley Graves, the kitchen’s coordinator, in that short time about 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.
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. According to Gaynor Yancey, faculty coordinator for the initiative and associate 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 by breaking the class into teams, with each functioning as a team would 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 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 about 350 student volunteers.
One of this year’s student volunteers and leaders is coordinator Anna Imose.
Her responsibilities include all of the planning, scheduling and paperwork — including a monthly report to the national office of Campus Kitchen.
This year, Imose said, the Baylor chapter will continue to prepare one full meal a week to be served at a local organization. They also will 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, 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 partner with a local farm to incorporate locally grown produce into the meals. The Wake Forest chapter also will be adding this element to its kitchen through a campus garden.
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 Waco, it’s a community that could really use the help. According to Yancey, Waco 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.”
Breaking bread and getting to know someone over a meal is “something pretty biblical,” Yancey said.