UMES Campus Kitchens at USG received $5500 from Whole Foods Rockville in a check presentation on Thursday, February 16. The donation is part of Whole Foods’ “5% days,” in which 5% from a local store’s net sales are contributed to an area nonprofit organization.
Campus Kitchens at USG is a service-learning program embedded into the curriculum of the UMES Hotel and Restaurant Management program at USG. Students in the program work to coordinate, prepare, and deliver hundreds of meals per month to the Dwelling Place, a transitional home in Gaithersburg, Md. for Montgomery County families experiencing homelessness. Campus Kitchens at USG is part of a national initiative, the Campus Kitchens Project, which operates on 31 campuses across the country. Its purpose is to provide healthy meals to those in need by harnessing the spirit of student volunteerism.
The money received from Whole Foods will be put toward training students on the Campus Kitchens Management Team, offering workshops to the Dwelling Place residents that provide basic culinary skills and education on healthy eating, and potentially adding more meals to the monthly totals.
“We are thrilled to have such amazing support from Whole Foods Market Rockville to help us continue to provide healthy family meals for Montgomery County residents through the CKP initiative,” said Susan Callahan, Chef Instructor, UMES Hotel and Restaurant Management at USG. “CKP helps our students develop essential professional hospitality skills for successful careers, while also developing the awareness and focus to be of service to the communities in which they live and do business."
Across the nation, Campus Kitchens share on-campus kitchen space and engage students as volunteers who prepare and deliver meals to those in need. The programs are entirely student run with students planning menus, getting food, running cooking shifts and organizing meal delivery. Since 2001, CKP has engaged more than 45,000 student volunteers in recovering more than one million pounds of donated food and delivering more than one million meals to their communities.