News-Letter

Media Credit: Daniel Litwin Students are working to donate unused campus food to homeless shelters.

Starting March 28, Hopkins will become a participant in the Campus Kitchens Project (CKP), a national organization, and will begin donating unused food from the Fresh Food Café (FFC) to homeless shelters and other organizations in the Baltimore area.

CKP, founded in 2001, is a growing non-profit movement at colleges across the country to make dining halls more sustainable and to tackle food security by donating leftover food that would otherwise be thrown away. Currently, 15 universities have such a program.

Senior Jerome "Axle" Brown, a public health major, became interested in the CKP when he learned that sustainability is closely linked to the problem of food security.

Brown and a group of seven other students are addressing the issue of food inequity in Baltimore by working to establish a chapter of the CKP at Hopkins.

According to the Baltimore City Health Department, one in eight low-income families in Baltimore suffer from food insecurity, which can lead to health risks such as obesity and diabetes.

"Food insecurity exists because we have an inequitable food system," Brown said. "I started thinking about ways we could change the [food system] at the local level."

Brown, the coordinator of the Hopkins chapter of Campus Kitchens, and his executive team of seven other students have spent the last semester establishing the major components necessary to start the program.

These components included a sponsoring office, places to donate the food, a facility in which to prepare the food, food donors and student volunteers.

The University's Center for Social Concern is the sponsoring office for the CKP.

According to sophomore Lena Denis, the public relations co-chair for the Hopkins chapter of the CKP, there are several community centers, food pantries and churches within a few miles of the Homewood Campus that have already expressed interest in receiving food donations.

"In the current economic situation, the food pantries are suffering from both ends," Denis said. "They receive fewer donations, but the number of people who need help is growing. We got a very positive response when we said we wanted to donate."

One of the first partnerships that CKP hopes to form is with Heart's Place, an overnight shelter located a few blocks south of campus.

Continued...

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