20th Campus Kitchen in the nation opens at Hopkins
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Held at University Baptist Church, the kick-off event included remarks from various sponsors and coordinators of the Campus Kitchens Project (CKP), a program aimed at providing relief to the hungry by recycling leftover food from University dining facilities.
Bill Carrell is the pastor of the University Baptist Church, which has offered the Hopkins chapter of CKP its industrial kitchen to use for meal preparation. According to Carrell, the Church was started in the 1970s as a mission to the University.
"[The Campus Kitchens Project] is a part of the continuing tradition between the Church and the University," Carrell said.
"Not every church would open its doors so readily," Bill Tiefenworth, director of the Hopkins Center for Social Concern (CSC), said. The CSC is the sponsoring office for CKP at Hopkins.
Following a welcome from Carrell and Tiefenworth, Jerome "Axle" Brown, coordinator of CKJHU, spoke to the crowd of volunteers and community members assembled at the church about how his vision for starting the Campus Kitchen came about.
While studying abroad in India, Brown witnessed the parallels between the "have" and "have not" communities.
"I asked myself 'How could this be?'" Brown said of the stark inequities he had seen. "We have such a unique position in the Baltimore community and are ideally situated to collaborate in campus-community partnerships."
Brown was overwhelmed by the number of community issues that needed to be addressed in Baltimore but decided to focus his energy on food insecurity. After hearing Robert Egger, founder of CKP, speak, Brown saw that the issue of food insecurity had a larger political and social context in Baltimore and he aimed to change it.
"Food is merely a vehicle for what we really want to do," Lena Denis, Public Relations Committee co-chair of CKJHU, said. "We really want to correct the inequalities of the system so people don't have to be hungry or unhealthy."
Mike Curtin, CEO of DC Central Kitchen, the umbrella organization for CKP, gave a keynote address at the event.
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