Anything Short of Felony
During the last two weeks I visited two of the DC Central Kitchen’s 20 Campus Kitchens. First I went to one of my top 10 schools, the University of Vermont in Burlington and then I rolled to one of my new favorites, the Minnesota State University at Mankato, which is the site of our first rural site.
And next Monday I’ll be on the road again, visiting an up and coming Campus Kitchens at William Jewel College in Liberty, MO.
It’s been a year or so since I paid a visited, and as always, I thought I was prepared for what I’d find. I wasn’t!!!
EACH of these labs of love is completely out of control, and I was literally knocked over by the caliber of the efforts they are undertaking. But that’s the entire point of the Campus Kitchen Project—to demonstrate what a new generation of leaders can create if you gave them solid training and then turn over the keys to the car.
Campus Kitchens was born on a trip to visit my folks, who live out in rural Indiana. I was vexed by how many of the community kitchens we helped launch (with advice, on-site training and totally free access to all the materials we had developed over the years) were now building fancy new, very expensive kitchens.
(Side note—modern industrial kitchens cost about $250 a square foot to build, so a new 10,000 sq. ft. kitchen would take $2.5 mill out of a local economy…which is a big ass bucket of dough)
Anyway…as I was driving, I noticed something. Sitting in a big field in this small town was a brand new high school—with a fat new kitchen in it. As I looked at it, I realized that it would be closed all afternoon, all night and all weekend. The town was surrounded by farmers trying to find a market for all their produce and fruits. And that town was full of aging citizens who would need meals soon.
I stopped the car and thought about this.
The Federal Government reimburses $5.00 for Meals on Wheels dinners. “Damn” (I thought)…you could keep a lot of farmer’s solvent by sourcing local foods for those meals, which would give a new generation of seniors the kind of locally grown foods they will soon be demanding anyway.
And…the old service model demands that all those kids had to leave school to get their community service hours!!!
Hmmmm…
If you could use that kitchen in the off hours (and there are close to 70,000 school cafeterias out there) then students could get service opportunities right on campus by helping to tend a community garden or prepare meals in that kitchen. Maybe other students could deliver those meals to seniors in the town—or better yet—invite them to an inter-generational after school program in the cafeteria…where they could help mentor younger students. Maybe they could ALL work in the community garden together, or develop joint service projects. Finally—some students who wanted to learn about social enterprise could also prepare meals to go for working family’s to buy when they picked up their kids after school, rather than run to the fried chicken stand or the burger shack. Any profit could be used to pay the salary of the music instructor that the current budget couldn’t afford.
Put all that together, Bruthas and Sistas, and you’ve got the makings of a bad ass new system made up exclusively of existing resources – which is how we roll at DCCK.
Flash forward to today. We just opened our 20th Campus Kitchen…and we’ve got ten more in the pipeline. But the story isn’t in the numbers—it’s in the fact that each of these projects is run by students. LOTS of folks talk about empowering young leaders—WE DO IT, and it works.
As we say to all the leaders—it’s YOUR show. Anything short of felony is OK with us. And you will be 150% blow away, as I am, by what they’ve done.
I urge you to check out the Campus Kitchen Project—they are rocking a new world!!!!!
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April 29th, 2009 at 10:14 am
Robert, you ROCK!!! more than anyone else in this philanthropy biz!!
from evryone who’s ever been hungry, WE LUV YA!!!
April 29th, 2009 at 2:03 pm
Hey everyone!
Check out the blog that CKP has been running almost every day since February. It’s a great source for updates, videos and non-profit news from the view point of an incubator for non-profits.
campuskitchens.org/blog
April 29th, 2009 at 10:17 pm
Incredible. What can I do to bring this to Dallas?
May 3rd, 2009 at 8:18 pm
[...] Anything Short of a Felony: We got a big ‘ol helping of love on DCCK founder and president Robert Egger’s blog this week. He writes that the point of CKP is to demonstrate what a new generation of leaders can create if you gave them solid training and then turn over the keys to the car. [...]