These households told the Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index that over the course of the last year, there were times, “when you did not have enough money to by the food that you or your family needed.”

Other metropolitan areas are not far behind; FRAC writes that 40 of the 100 largest areas reported more than one in four households with children experienced food hardship. 21 states and the District of Columbia also showed more than 25 percent of households with children undergoing food hardship.

Such staggering statistics makes the work of local hunger relief non-profits more important than ever.

The Campus Kitchen at Wake Forest University serves the Winston-Salem area and focuses on feeding a large variety of agencies including a majority of households with children. Every Monday, at the Children’s Home, the team of student volunteers serves single, homeless adolescent mothers and their children. The Campus Kitchen also built and maintains an on-site garden at El Buen Pastor, a Latino Community Center. The garden helps provide fresh produce for Latino households with children.

Where else is support of hunger relief organizations for households with children most needed? FRAC’s top five states include: Washington, D.C., Mississippi, Alabama, Florida, and Arkansas. Current Campus Kitchens serve three of the top five states (Gonzaga College High School, Auburn University, and University of Florida.)

Along with immediate food hardship relief, Campus Kitchen work molds powerful hunger relief advocates for the future.

Where does your Campus Kitchen state, county, or congressional district fall in this report? Take a look, and leave a response in the comments section below about what you’re doing to combat food hardship in households with children.

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In Vermont and North Carolina students are readying their palates for food weeks designed to bring awareness to their Campus Kitchen while shedding light on the hunger needs and food issues in their adopted communities.

Just what are these crazy Campus Kitchen kids up to? Take a look at (and be jealous of) their food agendas.

Vermont Food Summit:

Come celebrate a love for food and agriculture — through workshops, events, dancing, eating, and – of course – Battling the Campus Chefs!!

Monday, April 11th

Magic Hat Tour!
12-30-2:30pm, meeting at DC Circle
*Pre-registration Necessary

Growing Herbs Indoors
3:30-4:30pm in the Rosa Parks Room

Battle of the Campus Chefs
6pm in the Grand Maple Ballroom
$5 donation to The Campus Kitchen Project

Tuesday, April 12th

Urban Agriculture Series: Part 1
11:30-12:30pm in the Rosa Parks Room

Urban Agriculture Part 2: Rooftop Farming
1-2pm Rosa Parks Room

What Makes a Good Food System?
3-4pm Rosa Parks Room

Wednesday, April 13th

Meet Your Meat: Factory Farming and Their Ethical Implications
1-2pm Rosa Parks Room

Bringing Local Food to Campus
3-4pm Rosa Parks Room

Make Cheese, Not War
7-9pm U-Heights South Kitchen
*Pre-registration Necessary

Thursday, April 14th

Herbal Healing
12-1pm Rosa Parks Room

Mindful Eating and Spring Recipes
1:30-3pm Rosa Parks Room

Locavore Dinner and Contra Dance
7:30-11pm Billings Lounge North
Suggested Donation to The Campus Kitchen Project

Want to pre-register? Help out? Got questions?
Email: kitchens@uvm.edu

Check out http://www.uvm.edu/~vfs/ for more info!

Wake Forest’s Wake up to Food Week:

Events all week celebrating food, talking about food, and raising awareness about food issues!

Thursday 4/14:

lunch: Local Food Day in the Pit

Friday 4/15:

10-1pm WFU loves farmers walk to the opening day of Reynolda Village Farmer’s Market
*students will lead groups to the farmer’s market for opening day. Participants will receive a FREE WFU hearts Farmer’s canvas tote.

Saturday 4/16:

am- volunteer serving the homeless with Wake Saturdays
all day- Piedmont Earth Day Fair (shuttles running from campus)

Sunday 4/17:

7pm Screening of the film Lunchline with a Q&A to follow in Shorty’s with director Michael Graziano
* Lunchline is a documentary telling the history of the Federal School Lunch Program. To see the trailer visit http://www.ujifilms.com/lunchline/

Monday 4/18:

Meditation and Discussion event in To Hi garden

Tuesday 4/19:

Earth Day at the ZSR

Wednesday 4/20:

Health and Well Being day with free outdoor yoga, health quizzes, and local food from Reynolda Farmer’s Market for sale

Thursday 4/21:

11am-1pm- Chilli Cookoff to benefit Habitat for Humanity
* groups and individuals can enter a team to compete for the Golden Ladle for $25. To enter a team, contact Sarah Hayward @ haywsl0@wfu.edu

Friday 4/22:

10am-2pm- Farm and Garden tour with lunch at Breakfast of course.

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Many Campus Kitchens already put together activities to honor Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. Some are already thinking ahead to the next Turekypalooza.

For those looking to add some spice weekly to meal preparations this winter, we’ve gathered some dates for planning ahead to your next awareness-building event.

Event: Heart and Soul (Valentine’s Day)

Dates: February, the week of Valentine’s Day

Origin: The Campus Kitchens Project network (This used to be a network-wide event)

Description: Campus Kitchens provide Valentine’s-themed meals to their clients, but they don’t fill those meals with the expected sweets and chocolate. Instead Campus Kitchens like St. Louis University provide heart healthy soul food options as a way to promote healthier eating in their community. They take nutrition education one step further, providing personalized Valentine’s greeting cards and healthy soul food recipes to their clients in an effort to feed and spread the love.

Event: Earth Day

Dates: April 22

Origin: The Earth Day Network

Description: Each year, Earth Day marks the anniversary of what many consider the birth of the modern environmental movement in 1970. Celebrate your latest Campus Kitchen milestone (whether its 1000 meals served or 10,000) by throwing an outdoor, food-inspired event in an area of campus with lots of foot traffic. Last year, the Campus Kitchen at Gettysburg College hosted a 10 Ton Relay event to coincide with Earth Day, and challenged students to meal service-themed activities to celebrate 10 tons of food recovered.

Event: National Campus Sustainability Day

Dates: October 20

Origin: Campus Sustainability Planning Network

Description: Tap into green group homes, environmental majors, and those interested in furthering sustainability on your campus by hosting a campus-wide fair, documentary screening or awareness day, sponsored by your Campus Kitchen. The sustainability planning network could help with ideas on how to use this day to your advantage, but check out what the University of Georgia or University of North Carolina did last year for more ideas.

Event: National Homelessness and Hunger Awareness Week

Dates: November 14 – 20

Origin: Co-sponsored by: National Coalition for the Homeless and
National Student Campaign Against Hunger & Homelessness. (View the Manual.)

Description: Each year, one week before Thanksgiving, a number of schools, communities and cities take part in a nationwide effort to bring greater awareness to the problems of hunger and homelessness. The Campus Kitchen is a perfect vehicle to bring awareness since you deal with both! Whether its placing signs informational signs on the quad like the Campus Kitchen at University of Florida, or holding a week of food awareness events similar to the Campus Kitchen at Wake Forest University’s “Wake Up to Food Week”, use the time to show your college that Campus Kitchens combat more than just hunger.

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Wondering what’s stuffed inside Turkeypalooza? Gobble this down.

• The Campus Kitchen at Washington and Lee caught this child’s reaction to a delicious turkey dinner on video.
• At the Campus Kitchen at University of Florida has been canned- and they’re pretty happy about it.
• The coordinator at University of Massachusetts Boston gives us a 360 degree tour of her office full of donations after one day of Turkeypalooza Day 1.
• At St. Louis University, volunteers brined their turkeys (which looks like this) for the second year in a row!
• In its first year holding Turkeypalooza, the Campus Kitchen at University of Virginia fed 200 with this awesome poster and help from the community.
• The Daily Northwestern covered the Campus Kitchen at Northwestern University’s massive Turkeypalooza effort.
• The local TV News showed up to the Campus Kitchen at Wake Forest University’s Turkeypalooza cooking event.
• Read more about all the Thanksgiving feeding efforts on our #Turkeypalooza twitter feed. Also check our CK Local Events Calendar for information on a Turkeypalooza near you.

Stay-tuned as more Campus Kitchens carve into distinctive Turkey Day events.

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“If we can get more food, I think we should get more food.”

That’s the motto the Campus Kitchen at Wake Forest University took on when Coordinator Shelley Sizemore posed the question of adding a local grocery store’s food donations last year to the plentiful donations she already receives from dining services. Her senior leadership team members thought she should. A little creativity could solve any space and distribution issues.

“A lot of times, a quarter of what we get from donations is rotten. I take it and put it in the compost bin,” says Graves. “I’m grateful for the three quarters that’s not.”

Over the past year,  the Campus Kitchen’s partnership with The Fresh Market has matured into a robust produce rescue program that works to feed members of three partner agencies in Winston-Salem, N.C.: The Shalom Project, El Buen Pastor, and Potter’s House.  Shortly after forming the unique partnership with the European-style specialty/gourmet grocery store chain, Sizemore says she noticed her team was exposing Winston-Salem’s underserved to goods they would never otherwise get to try. For the student’s who run the rescue shifts, the picture of wasted food also started becoming clearer.

Sizemore says a part-time Wake Forest University staff member who also worked at Fresh Market alerted her to the food waste coming from the specialty grocery store because of its patrons’ high-aesthetic requirements for food. Employees could not take home the food ready to be thrown out. The employee asked if Sizemore and her team could bag up the extras.

“We go directly to Fresh Market and we’ve guaranteed we will come everyday, Monday through Friday,” says Sizemore.

Fresh Market offers up grocery carts full of the food they’re getting rid of, which has been known to include Godiva chocolate truffles, gourmet nuts, lobster bisque, and specialty mushrooms in the past. The kitchen comes away with an average of 600 pounds a week.

From there Sizemore sorts what she needs for the Campus Kitchen meals and then ships the rest to the agencies, who each created a protocol for processing and distributing it to community members. She says she sees the benefit of adding these specialty items to children’s diets in particular.

“Think about when you were growing up and your parents told you to try everything on your plate. They knew if you weren’t exposed, you wouldn’t know what’s available to you,” say Sizemore. “If we can get these kids to associate fresh items with something that’s accessible to them, that helps with nutrition.”

Sizemore says she has also witnessed students getting passionate about food waste issues after they see how much a specialty grocery store needs to get rid of. It’s become an educational program for her students.

For those looking to build a similar partnership with a local specialty store, Sizemore offers this advice: “Build those partnerships early and use them in a way that is not just beneficial for the kitchen, but beneficial for them to share with others and post on Facebook.”

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In one week’s time, through hours of labor and a little creativity, a North Carolina church group transformed a communal garden into a true community gathering spot.

The Campus Kitchen at Wake Forest University participated in 2010’s MLK Day of Service by committing to a year-long project to build a community garden at a partner agency site: El Buen Pastor. While the garden began yielding fresh produce this Spring, it hadn’t quite yielded the community gathering activities CKWFU had hoped for. That’s where Grace Haven Baptist Fellowship came in. Their mission: build a pavilion-like structure, run a day camp, and volunteer at the Campus Kitchen – all in one week.

“One of the things we really wanted to do was facilitate the garden as more of a community space,” says Shelley Graves, Campus Kitchen coordinator. “We wanted to encourage El Buen Pastor’s members to cook dinner, grill out, do weeding or watering, harvest together, and lay the harvest in the shade to divide up.”

While the group of 31 middle and high school students worked alongside the men from El Buen Pastor to build an earthquake/hurricane-proof pavilion approximately 35 by 45 feet, holding 50 people, the middle and high school students also led a day camp each morning for some of the community’s younger children. The day camp focused on sustainability, with an emphasis on what partnering with the earth actually means. The group took campers through everything from recycling, to how to weed in the garden, to introducing children to a birds of prey rescuer.

“With the wildlife rescuer, you would have thought there was a celebrity in the room,” says Graves. “All eyes were fixed on her.”

In the afternoons, the group rotated to work for the Campus Kitchen. While only those 18 plus were allowed to work in the kitchen during the meal preparation shift, the rest of the group worked in the Campus Kitchen garden and participated in daily Fresh Market produce pickups.

“Fresh Market gave them a really good visual image of food waste and what is considered trash and yet still edible,” says Graves. “I think that it was a really good, teachable moment.”

Thanks to cooperation and university support (the church group received a free dinner, reduced pricing on group housing, and entertainment), the group completed work on the structure early and had extra materials, so they decided to build a fence around the MLK garden to help keep out pests. And while El Buen Pastor gained something extra, the service group gained more than they planned for too.

“The group talked about food and what gets thrown away,” says Graves. “They learned things like how do you curb what you put on your plate and eat in a responsible way.” Graves added that the language barrier – especially that with the younger kids at El Buen Pastor – was a good challenge for the group to overcome.

On the final day of the service week, the two groups switched roles, this time with El Buen Pastor serving Grace Baptist. The church group worked a half day, then went to Hanging Rock State Park, with a home-cooked lunch of thanks from the community.

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The finished pavillion may look like this. Or not. But you get the idea.

At the end of this week, the El Buen Pasteur community garden, sponsored by the Campus Kitchen at Wake Forest University, will have a new, shaded pavilion – and a group of 31 new friends.

A church youth group, located two hours from the Winston-Salem, NC campus, arrived at the El Buen Pasteur community grounds Monday for a welcoming dinner with a long to-do list. Among other things, the middle and high school students planned to:  run a day camp, work all Campus Kitchen cooking and delivery shifts, and complete a large, wood pavilion to stand near the garden.

“It’s a very clear need and it’s something that they can definitely do,” said Shelley Graves, Campus Kitchen coordinator. Graves organized the trip through her parents, who are both pastors at the church.

According to Graves, the church will bring along some experienced contractors, in addition to the youth group, which has done a good deal of disaster relief and construction-based service trips. Unfortunately, most of those trips have become pretty expensive.

“This will allow them to do service affordably,” says Graves. “We’re housing them on the Wake campus and we got a really good deal.” Aramark will provide a free dinner to the group on Wednesday.

Once completed, the pavilion will allow El Buen Pasteur, a Latino community services organization and CKWFU community partner, to organize additional programming, like nutrition education seminars. The shaded structure may also encourage local kids to do more weeding and tending.

“When they go out and harvest they could literally bring the harvest in and set it on the picnic table and divide it amongst the families,” says Graves.

In the mornings, the church youth group will run a day camp for the younger children at El Buen Pasteur, teaching stewardship of the earth in addition to specifics like recycling and wildlife rescue. For the afternoon, many students will work in the crop garden enriching the soil and planting crops, in addition to the work on the pavilion.

If the structure isn’t finished at the end of the week, Graves says the church has weekend follow up visits lined up to pour the last of the concrete.

Graves also says the church will get something back:  many children from working class families will get the chance to spend time on a college campus and imagine what it might be like to attend an institution like Wake Forest University.

“I’m hoping this works out and we can make it a model for next year and slowly build it,” says Graves.

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The Princeton Review recognized that more and more high school seniors choose their colleges based on how environmentally conscious they are. Of those surveyed, 24 percent of students said that a college’s commitment to the environment would “very much” impact their college decision. This gave the university ratings company reason to devise a method for evaluating a schools greenness, using campus commitment to sustainability, the degree of environmental academics, and efforts to reduce a school’s carbon footprint in the future.

Campus Kitchens are the poster child for campus sustainability, environmental service learning, and reducing waste on campus, so it’s no surprise that eleven of 26 kitchens were deemed among the 268 Greenest Colleges in America.

CK Coordinators show of their new, more efficient (green!) kitchen at Gettysburg, during their Earth Day event

So what makes campuses “green”? Aside from having a Campus Kitchen?  Some of the things The Princeton Review sited are: availability of locally grown food, green buildings on campus, formal committees on sustainability, environmental degrees, biodegradable containers, and alternative modes of transport on campus.

Below is a list of the eleven current Campus Kitchens to make the cut. Three more likely Campus Kitchens in Fall 2010 also made the list: Elon College, Louisiana State University, and Tulane University.

College of William and Mary

Gettysburg College

Johns Hopkins University

Marquette University

St. Lawrence University

Union College

University of Florida

University of Massachusetts Boston

University of Vermont

University of Virginia

Wake Forest University

It’s not easy being green.

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Coordinator Shelley Graves, and her Campus Kitchen leadership team, revved up their food week with a chili cook-off competition between student groups on the quad at lunchtime Tuesday.

That evening, CKWFU invited the student body for a documentary screening at a new café on campus: Shorty’s. The café recently became one of the only alternatives to cafeteria style foods, and it’s already engaged in serving local foods. Café owners used the opportunity to highlight some of their local fare: grass-fed beef from Grayson Natural Foods, chips and homemade salsa, and Krispy Kreme donuts bread pudding, with donuts picked up from the local factory (Krispy Kreme was founded in Winston-Salem, N.C., home of Wake Forest.)  Shorty’s also poured Winston-Salem Foothills brews for attendees of age.

The documentary, Fresh, celebrates farmers, thinkers, and business owners across the nation who are reinventing the food system. Participants munched and sipped while watching on Shorty’s big screen.

Wednesday, the Campus Kitchen at Wake Forest urged its student body to “go green” for St. Patrick’s Day. Thursday would bring perhaps the most anticipated part of food week: D.C. Central Kitchen founder Robert Egger will speak on the business of healthy food for all in an open forum with the Wake Forest community. Robert Egger is also founder of The Campus Kitchens Project and regularly travels to Campus Kitchen locations (now 26) to connect with student hunger activists.

Egger will speak at 7 p.m. in Wake Forest’s Pew Auditorium, but he’ll continue to meet and greet students until the food week is finished. Graves said students are already signed up to eat lunch and dinner with him, and he’ll  guest lecture to a class Friday morning.

Symbolic of a week concentrated on food awareness and hunger relief, the Campus Kitchen will launch its Campus Garden to finish off the week’s bountiful activities.

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The Campus Kitchen at Washington and Lee University, in addition to just serving its 50,000th meal, also discovered an amazing grant opportunity to bolster your Campus Kitchen’s going green campaign.

The One by One campaign, run by 4imprint, grants $500 worth of promotional products each business day to help causes spread the word, thank donors, recruit volunteers, and add to programs.

Anyone who is part of a 501c(3) charity is eligible apply.  Just fill out the simple form here. Jenny Sproul, coordinator for the Campus Kitchen at Washington and Lee received the $500 in-kind grant, and says that while it’s not going to cover all the containers, it’s a good start.

Read more about the kind of containers Jenny is buying at The Kitchen Table (email jtouton@campuskitchens.org for an invite.)

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