Campus Kitchen Gets Chopped: Admin Vetos Club Proposal

Written By: Phuong Tran ‘15

Published December 2014

Walk into Cheatham Dining Hall on any night of the week, and you’ll see a veritable bounty of food laid out before you. A tray of chicken-and-okra gumbo, heaps of Szechuan stir-fry, and piles of French fries. What you less likely to notice, are the large containers of food that are thrown out when meal time is over.

“It’s about 30 pounds, sometimes even 40 pounds, of food waste every night,” said Lauren Snead ‘15, who currently works the evening shift at the Dining Hall. “Of course it’s bad we have to throw the food out. But I try and make sure there is as little waste as possible when I work.”

Professor Jennifer Dugan and Paul Rush ‘16 visited W&L and VMI as a part of their 2014 

Summer Research Project to implement a Campus Kitchen at Randolph. 

Photo courtesy of Rush.

Like Snead, Paul Rush ‘16 has always felt uneasy about the waste, knowing that there are many homeless people in Lynchburg who have little or no food to eat. “Throughout my life, I’ve gone from being on welfare to having wealth. Along the way I’ve met many who haven’t been as lucky as me. I’ve never forgotten them. Some of them are like family and I really wanted a way to help.”

Rush thought that he had found a way to help in the Campus Kitchen Project (CKP), a national community service organization dedicated to promoting sustainability on college campuses and combating hunger in surrounding communities. Student leaders at participating schools team up with dining services providers to create a student-run kitchen facility where excess food is recycled into nutritious meals for the needy. CKP offers students the opportunity to participate in and contribute to the collective fight against hunger. It is also aims to provide participants with leadership skills and offer practical education opportunities in the culinary arts, health, and nutrition.

Rush first learned of the CKP in Global to Local Studies, a political science class taught by Professor Jennifer Dugan,. “We covered the topic of food security and CKP’s parent organization,” he explained, “and that’s where it started.”

From there, Rush embarked upon a summer research project with Dugan. Together, they created a plan for a Randolph Campus Kitchen (RCK), taking stock of local needs, seeking out food donors, and making arrangements with Randolph’s campus food vender Aramark. 

“Eighteen percent of the residents of Lynchburg are food insecure and our school is close to one of the city’s food deserts,” Rush explained. “There is also a proven abundance of excessive produce and food, from the Community Market to local restaurants, and donors are enthusiastic about contributing their surplus. By implementing the CKP model to Randolph, I hope that we can be an important community partner in reducing food insecurity.”

Rush and Dugan were aiming for RCK to begin delivering food to ltwo of Lynchburg’s hunger relief organizations this fall. “We worked all summer, researching, writing business plan, and meeting with community members as well as campus leaders,” said Dugan.

In early August, Rush went to DC to attend a CKP “boot camp,” a three-day training seminar in running, sustaining, and marketing a Campus Kitchen. Mitch Rodhe, Randolph’s dining hall director, signed on to support RCK by supplying kitchen and storage facilities; providing training in food safety; donating food; and allowing RCK to purchase food from Aramark’s existing vendors.

Rush set about recruiting fellow classmates, including Angie Chen ’17, an enthusiastic RCK advocate, who confirmed, “I was really excited about the project.” And Dugan mentioned the proposal to interested faculty members. “We discussed how it would fit into our classes,” she explained. “There is a willing body of faculty who would be interested in incorporating the work on the Kitchen into their class objectives.”

Despite the excitement, the RCK proposal was ultimately shelved in September due confusion over how such a program would be administered. Dugan and Rush had submitted the proposal to President Brad Bateman for approval. Bateman had shown support for RCK when Prof. Dugan mentioned it to him in July. However, he wasn’t prepared to sign off on the application this year, a decision that left the students involved confused and disappointed. “I have had a meeting with Wes Fugate for an explanation, but I was still unconvinced as to why the project was turned down,” said Rush.

In a meeting with The Sundial on November 5, President Bateman explained his decision. “When she first came to me in July, I told Professor Dugan that we would consider it,” he said. “As we looked into the proposal, we increasingly found potential problems with this community service projects competing with the six projects we had chosen to do this year.”

Those projects are part of the Randolph’s ongoing efforts to get students out into the community for volunteer work. President Bateman has emphasized that community involvement is integral to a liberal arts education. To that end, he assigned Amanda Denny, then MAC supervisor, as director of the Office of Leadership and Engagement, a position devoted to the development of volunteer community service programs for students.

Denny created a committee of faculty, staff, and students to look at organizations in Lynchburg that Randolph could partner with. They picked six, which offer a diversity of volunteering experiences and which the school has the resources to support. That work wrapped up in April.

When the RCK proposal was submitted in September, President Bateman was concerned that it might compete for financing, transportation, and student volunteers with the six projects Denny had initiated. “As we looked into this and talked to other campuses that support Campus Kitchen, we found out that almost all of their volunteers and resources went into this single project,” said President Bateman. “After having picked the six programs that we worked all year to select, it did not seem right to me to let this program come in and perhaps push those out of the way, or ask Amanda Denny, after she has done so much work on this, to then help to put the majority of her time into this project.”

Regarding what RCK can do to have the project approved, President Bateman said, “I think that Campus Kitchen is a wonderful project, but ultimately if we are going to do Campus Kitchen, it has to emerge from the process by which we pick the group. We have to think of it in the constellation of all the programs we support.” He also offered that he will happily reconsider RCK for next year.

Dugan, who’d received a nod of support for RCK from Dean of Students Matha Thornton in July, wasn’t satisfied with that explanation. She felt that having Thornton sponsor RCK made the most sense, since Denny was already busy with numerous other projects.

“I am not sure how Campus Kitchen would have affected Amanda because she was intentionally left out of the equation,” said Dugan. “I think each person has his or her own idea of how it would work. Paul and I certainly had our ideas, and President Bateman probably thought it should fit into Amanda’s thing. Matha thought she could sponsor it. Next time we will have to sit in the room at the same time.”

In light of the perceived difficulties in getting RCK up and running this year, Rush has decided not to pursue the project any further. “Doing this kind of volunteer work is very difficult,” he explained. “Legally, it gets tricky. Financially, it’s strenuous. And it is very time consuming. I understand the administration’s hesitations and fears. I would have them too.”

Dugan went on to explain the confusion surrounding RCK. “I think there are different and conflicting understandings of what the Kitchen is going to require. Paul and I met with the President, Matha, Kris Irwin, Mitch, and Jim Manero, all separately. I think a good lesson is to try to meet with everybody together because the group together may have come to a better consensus. I feel it’s absolutely necessary for a project like this to be supported by everybody at the highest level. That’s the next thing we will need to achieve.”

Thornton also believes that it is more advisable for the RCK to be funneled through the Office of Leadership and Engagement. “We are a community and I do not think it is possible to do this work independently,” she said. “In our initial meeting, I shared with Professor Dugan and Paul that I was concerned with the demands of the program. Before coming to Randolph, my previous institution sponsored a very active Campus Kitchens program. Having supported and volunteered for the program, I was familiar with the amount of dedicated hours necessary for this program to succeed.