In 1989, while volunteering with a hunger-relief group in Washington DC, Robert Egger discovered two things. First, non-profit organizations purchase food every day, while restaurants throw away food every night. Second, handing out food doesn't solve any long-term problems. Egger also envisioned a solution: utilizing food rescue to provide meals to non-profits, while seeing food as a tool to teach people job skills.
Egger's ideas fell on deaf ears with existing non-profits, so he founded DC Central Kitchen (DCCK), calling it a "community kitchen." DCCK makes innovative use of existing resources such as kitchen space, donated food, volunteers, and the motivation of those living in poverty to better their own lives. Each day at DCCK, adults in the Culinary Job Training program learn job skills. And each day, Job Training students work with volunteers to turn two tons of rescued food into meals for community agencies.
DCCK's "community kitchen" concept soon attracted national attention, and people across the country used the model to open community kitchens in their cities. Still, the movement was hindered by a lack of enough community-accessible kitchen space to make meals, host volunteers and train adults. Egger's next big idea came when he realized that schools have kitchens that close after lunch; that a school is a central place in each community; and that volunteerism among young people is on the rise. From this idea, a partnership was born with the American School Food Service Association. This partnership uses the DCCK model to pioneer "Kitchens In Schools"; the program now has kitchens in seventeen states.
In 1999, Karen Borchert and Jessica Jackson, both juniors at Wake Forest University, wanted to enhance their education by engaging with the larger community. Working on the premise that food connects people on a basic level, they founded Homerun, a student-run volunteer agency. To this day, Homerun provides healthy meals, prepared and delivered by Wake Forest University students, to people who need it most.
In 2001, the history and concepts came together. Armed with DC Central Kitchen's rich history and "best practices," the expertise of more than 60 community kitchens and Kitchens In Schools, and the concept of student-empowered leadership and service learning, The Campus Kitchens Project was launched.
The result is a growing network of Campus Kitchens in which students of all ages devote tens of thousands of hours each year to gain leadership skills by recycling food from campus dining; preparing meals in shared dining hall kitchens; delivering thousands of meals a month to families and agencies near campus; educating adults and children about nutrition; and training people for jobs in foodservice.
