A new University of Georgia student group has found a way to tackle two problems at once — wasted food and hungry Athenians.
“That’s the great thing about this. On the one hand, it’s doing something about food waste and consumer waste, and on the other hand, it’s also doing something about hunger and poverty,” said UGA senior Camden Lowrance, a geography major from Tifton who volunteers with the UGA Campus Kitchen Task Force.
Twice a month, some of the students — a mix of volunteers and students enrolled in “service learning” courses that require volunteer work in the community — gather on a Wednesday to prepare home-cooked meals with donated foods.
Then Lowrance and other students show up the next evening to deliver the meals to some special Athens-Clarke County households. This week, about 84 meals, two meals each for 42 people, were delivered.
Working with the Athens Community Council on Aging, the group has targeted families in which grandparents are raising grandchildren.
“It’s just two hours, and you can give so much,” said UGA student Ashton Johnson of Tyrone, who helped cook on Wednesday.
The council works with about 30 families, a fraction of the number in Athens and surrounding counties where the parents are not in the home for a variety of reasons, said the council’s Paige Tidwell.
Not all of them are poor, but many are — and few expected to take on the big job of raising children during a time when many expected to be retiring, Tidwell said.
The first stop on Lowrance’s route Thursday was the home of Emma Vinson, 77, who’s become mother for two of her great-grandsons, Daquavious and Jawon.
A school bus driver for 18 years, Vinson raised six children of her own and was for 31 years a foster parent. Vinson and her great-grandsons aren’t going hungry, but the food the students bring is good — and for a couple of nights, Vinson doesn’t have to cook for the whole family.
“It’s a blessing,” she said.
Campus Kitchen hopes to build up to weekly deliveries to the families, said Sarah Jackson of UGA’s Office of Service Learning, which works with the group.
The group had its beginnings about two years ago, thanks to social work graduate student Sarah Himmelheber, who knew that other universities already had similar programs affiliated with a national group, The Campus Kitchens Project.
The UGA group plans to become part of the national group, Jackson said. The project now has 31 affiliates, including Auburn University and the University of Florida.
After Himmelheber met with Shannon Wilder, head of the service learning office, and Cecelia Herles, assistant director of UGA’s Institute for Women’s Studies, her idea began to come together.
Herles got one of her classes involved. The class was studying the issues of environment, gender, race and class, and the campus kitchen idea was a neat fit, she said.
“One of the really exciting things is that it’s not really controversial,” she said — everyone can see that food waste and hunger are problems.
“I wanted to steer the students toward something that could really be accomplished before their eyes,” said Herles, who became the group’s faculty adviser.
“I think the students have really had their eyes opened,” Herles said.
The group is also unusual just for the sheer number of other groups on campus and in Athens that have pitched in to help.
The student-maintained UGArden give the group fresh produce for its meals — as well as bouquets of flowers to deliver to the families this week. The Campus Kitchen also gets food from the Food Bank of Northeast Georgia, campus fraternities and sororities, Trader Joe’s and restaurants like Jimmy John’s and Red Lobster.
The Talmage Terrace retirement community, the Georgia Center for Continuing Education and the Presbyterian Student Center have also helped, allowing the students to prepare food in their kitchens.
At Talmage Terrace, where students do most of their cooking, they’re getting not only space but professional guidance in cooking.
Residents at the retirement community have even begun to pitch in, said Jane Anderson, director of dining services at Talmage Terrace, as she offered tips on browning stew beef to student cooks Wednesday evening.
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