Just because they temporarily stopped filling backpacks with food for their local elementary school (because, well, there are no kids at school), doesn’t mean volunteers at the Campus Kitchen at Washington and Lee University have stopped filling stomachs in the Lexington, Va. area.

Campus Kitchen volunteers are often harder to come by during the summer months, but CKWLU has found a way to expand meal service and programming to feed local youth through summer camps.

Children from the local YMCA work in the Campus Kitchen garden

CKWLU partners with the Lexington City Office on Youth’s Summer Fun program to serve snacks five days a week and provide nutrition education on Thursday afternoons. They teach lessons on everything from good vs. bad sugars to how to maximize calories as fuel.

The Campus Kitchen also plays host to the local YMCA summer camp, inviting youth into their garden to learn about where food really comes from through nutrition education programming.

The extra feeding doesn’t stop there; in partnership with the Concerned Citizens group, where the Campus Kitchen serves bi-monthly community dinners year-round, CKWL served two lunches to the Glasgow Summer Enrichment Program.

Campus Kitchen leaders and volunteers execute all of these tasks in addition to regular pickups from places like Walmart, where they sometimes get up to 400 pounds of eggs, cooking shifts, and meal deliveries that they carry out throughout the year.

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