OVERVIEW
The Campus Kitchen at Wake Forest is a Food Recycling program that uses cooked but never served food from the campus dining hall to make healthy and nutritious meals for the needy of our community. Our Campus Kitchen has quite a history. It grew out of a student run program called Homerun started by two Wake Forest Juniors in 1999. Karen Borchert and Jessica Jackson went on to start the national program called “The Campus Kitchens Project.”
These two are high achievers! Did you know that recently in The Washingtonian, Karen was featured as one of DC’s 40 People Under 40 to Watch? We’re proud of Karen and Jessica for their awesome accomplishments. And as of fall 2010, there were 25 Campus Kitchens nationwide!
The hope of every Campus Kitchen is to find a way to fit into a community and meet needs using existing resources. Our Campus Kitchen here at Wake seems to be on the right track. Through a great partnership with ARAMARK, we are able to reuse an average of 600 pounds of food every month; food that is prepared but never served for students on campus and would otherwise go to waste. Our other key resources are Wake Forest students, faculty, and staff. These tireless volunteers truly embody the university motto of Pro Humanitate, giving of their time and talents to prepare and serve meals for Winston-Salem community members in need. Our food is used by local social service agencies who are already doing incredible work in Winston-Salem. These agencies use our food as a resource so that they can allocate existing but limited resources to increase their services to the communities they serve.
So who is behind all of this? The awesome part of the Campus Kitchen is that it is a student driven organization. Our Leadership Team holds weekly meetings, plans the meals, runs the shifts, trains new volunteers, advertises, plans events, raises funds, and is ServSafe certified. Not bad, huh? And during the semester the majority of our volunteers are students, too. To help tie it all together, each Campus Kitchen has one dedicated staff member. That would be the Campus Kitchen Coordinator. The Coordinator leads with students, planning the direction of CKWFU and solving problems as a team. The Campus Kitchens Project is a national program, but without the tireless support of Wake Forest University, CKWFU would not be able to exist. WFU shows its commitment to Pro Humanitate in its investment of money, resources, and support of the program. We flourish because Wake believes in the ability of its students to make a positive difference in the world and invests in them accordingly. The Campus Kitchen is one of WFU’s premier sustainability initiatives; rescuing food that would otherwise be wasted and using it to fight hunger and poverty in the greater Winston-Salem area. To learn more about increased efforts towards sustainability, please visit: WFU sustainibility.
For more information you can listen to a 88.5 WFDD News Story (mp3 format) about the Campus Kitchen, or visit the National web site. If you have questions about volunteering or would like to apply to be a Partner Agency with CKWFU, please first look at our Frequently Asked Questions page, then e-mail us.