As winter sets in, cold weather campus kitchens are preparing to run cooking and delivery shifts through the iciest days of winter. Ashley McCarthy and other volunteers of the Campus Kitchen at Univeresity of Wisconsin Eau Claire learned some important lessons about planning and quick thinking when wintry conditions become dangerous for volunteers.

Read Ashley’s account of CKUWEC’s first blizzard warning delilvery below.

For CKUWEC, this will be our first year dealing with the worst of the winter weather as we started last February so we will certainly be playing things by ear.  We’ve already learned that flexibility and creative problem-solving are going to be key to maintaining regular operations during those lovely winter days.  As the coordinator, it is important to me that our clients can rely on us for meal delivery even when the weather is far from ideal.  However, the safety of my volunteers is the most important thing so there are times when I will cancel shifts because I don’t believe my volunteers (or myself) should be driving or walking in the snow and sub-zero temperatures.

The storm we had to deal with this week is a good example of just how fantastically crazy the weather can be up here in Wisconsin.  Normally, we have a cooking shift on Tuesday evenings and then deliver food Wednesday.  This past Tuesday afternoon, myself and a co-worker ventured out to get a little supplemental food for the shift that evening.  I was concerned about the weather being an issue for delivery the next morning, but the roads were already slick and treacherous and I quickly decided I didn’t want my volunteers to try to come to campus that evening to cook.  Fortunately, we’d had a donation of bread and chips earlier in the week and were already at the store so we grabbed peanut butter and jelly and headed to the kitchen.  A quick phone call to our main partner agency allowed us to arrange a small delivery for that same afternoon to get them through a couple days until the weather cleared.

Creative Commons

In about 45 minutes we were able to throw together PB&J, chips, baked apples that we already had in the freezer, and some frozen veggies. We successfully delivered the meals before the snow really started to pile up.  This turned out to be the best decision we could have possibly made, as we got more than a foot of snow and were in a blizzard warning that night and next day.  The university was closed on Wednesday and we got to enjoy our snow day knowing that our clients were still able to eat!

This solved our problem in the short term, but not long term.  See, we typically deliver an entire weeks worth of meals at a time, and the sandwiches would only get them through a couple days so we still had to find a way to get them more meals later in the week.  Luckily, our amazing volunteers were willing to come cook Thursday evening despite having finals the next week.  In the end, we were able to prepare and deliver all the meals we would normally provide, it was just a little more stressful and hectic than a normal week!  Undoubtedly, this will not be the only time we deal with this issue in the coming months and we learned that both being adaptable and having already prepared and packaged meals in the freezer to pull out quickly will be very important to maintaining operations.

Have other suggestions for how campus kitchens can prepare for a storm? Leave them below.

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