Feeding the Multitude

It might not be a miracle on the scale of five loaves and two fishes, but at least Baylor students have a bit more to work with than the Galilean carpenter did. The Baylor University Campus Kitchen (BUCK) project officially kicked off on MLK Day by serving more than a thousand lunches to the hardworking volunteers of the Heart of Texas Urban Gardening Coalition. Baylor's Campus Kitchen chapter, which began as a class project last fall in the School of Social Work, aims to reclaim unused food from Baylor dining halls to provide free meals to Waco's underserved.

Every day, Baylor dining halls prepare more food than is eaten, and every day it goes to waste. The Campus Kitchen project is a national nonprofit organization devoted to reclaiming perfectly good victuals from college cafeterias and using them to feed the needy. And, according to U.S. Census figures, the needy are plentiful in Waco. Baylor sociologists and demographic specialists evaluated 2007 census data and determined that the poverty rate for families in Waco was 21.9 percent, compared to a national average of 9.5 percent.

That kind of need helped inspire a Campus Kitchen at Baylor, which was promoted by Dr. Gaynor Yancey, associate professor in the School of Social Work, and Rosemary Townsend, director of business affairs at Baylor. But the execution of the idea was left entirely up to the students. Beth Kilpatrick, who is pursuing a master’s of social work at Baylor, describes the Advanced Community Practice course: "Our entire assignment for our class was to get the Campus Kitchen up and running as a chartered organization, and we did it."

Yancey's students were tasked with forming a nonprofit organization, which required a three-year financial forecast and the formation of two advisory boards—one composed of students and another of representatives of the Waco community. They negotiated with Columbus Avenue Baptist Church for the temporary use of their outreach building, The Center, which had to be inspected by health officials, and all of the students involved had to go through an Aramark food preparation certification course.

Flor Avellaneda (pictured, left, with supervisor Sharla Porter), another MSW student in the class, was assigned the task of promoting the project and managing community relations. Although she finished her class assignment last fall, Avellaneda is still involved.

"This semester I took the role of student coordinator for BUCK," she says. She is not alone. There are at least seven students from Yancey's class who are still involved in leading the Campus Kitchen project.

The students of Yancey's class weren't content with saving food from Baylor dining halls. BUCK also has food pledges from area restaurants—including Uncle Dan's Barbecue, Wingstop, and Golden Corral—and has been allowed to purchase food from Texas State Technical College's dining services at a greatly reduced price. With such support already in place, the real challenge is finding ways to serve that much food.

BUCK leaders have decided that the best way to solve that problem is to partner with established Waco outreach organizations. That's why the launch of Baylor's chapter of the Campus Kitchen project coincided with a massive volunteer effort involving, according to one count, thirty-five organizations working at eleven urban gardening sites.

On MLK Day, the 228 BUCK volunteers arrived at The Center at eight o'clock in the morning to start putting chips and sandwiches into boxes for delivery to nine locations around Waco. It was supposed to take all morning.

"We had so many volunteers . . . they had all the lunches boxed up within thirty minutes," beamed Yancey, whose class still forms the core of the Campus Kitchen project, even after the final exam. Though Yancey oversaw the morning's activities like a proud mother hen, she stressed that it was the students who planned and organized everything. "I am here as an advisor and a resource," she says. "My voice is way, way, way in the background."

Student participation is not limited to social work majors and certainly not just to graduate students. Avellaneda explains, "BUCK is a multidisciplinary organization. Any Baylor student can join. The broad range of skills that are brought by these students is what makes BUCK productive."

If the MLK Day experiment is any indication, there are plenty of Baylor students willing to volunteer, from such diverse disciplines as biology, history, and business.

But not every day is the King Day of Service, and Baylor's Campus Kitchen project has access to more food than it knows what to do with. According to Yancey, BUCK plans to distribute food once per week during the spring semester through a partnership with Restoration Haven, Inc., a social program working to improve lives and foster community in the South Waco area.

Yancey's vision for the program doesn't stop there. She hopes the organization will one day be able to purchase its own lot and work with Habitat for Humanity to build a facility with its own dining area and educational facilities that can provide food-related job-skills training to Waco's needy.

"In all ways, it [BUCK] has the potential of bringing us together, truly as a community that cares for each other," Yancey says.