A common meal

This spring, I became involved with a program on campus called Hunger Lunch, run by the Vanderbilt chapter of Manna Project International. Manna Project has been present in many different forms on campus since I have been attending school at Vanderbilt, and only recently decided to add Hunger Lunch to their plethora of community service and outreach opportunities. As soon as I heard about Hunger Lunch and its mission statement, I decided that I wanted to devote my time and energy to the event as the main part of my HELM project at Vanderbilt.

Hunger Lunch aims to raise money to fight world hunger, a major problem in many underdeveloped areas of the world. To do this, students share a lunch in solidarity with the world's hungry population, who often eat only rice or beans as a main part of their diet. Therefore, at every Hunger Lunch we share a meal of rice and beans, and everyone who attends then donates the money they would have spent on lunch that day to a previously picked hunger-fighting institution, such as Heifer Project International. Manna Project has been running Hunger Lunches monthly since the beginning of the 2006-2007 school year, as I joined on in January, I quickly found out how much effort was required to organize and run such a project.

I worked closely with the student chair of Hunger Lunch, and we organized the remainder of the events for the year. Basically, we had to coordinate the set up of the outdoor event, arrange for food to be supplied (free from our dining hall), and decide what type of entertainment we would like to provide along with the lunch. All of this work took some time, but the final product made it easy to see how our efforts benefited the campus and the worldwide effort we were striving for. An intrinsically gratifying part of helping to coordinate hunger lunch was the introduction to many other students who were interested in participating in the cause that Hunger Lunch stands for. I met an entire group of people at Vanderbilt that I had not realized existed. As I grew to know them over the course of the semester, I also began to integrate my other groups of friends with common interest in political, economic, and social injustices that are present in the world today. I also learned about the existence of similar groups and events at colleges in other parts of the country, such as the CROP affiliated lunches run by an acquaintance at Davidson University.

Working on Hunger Lunch this year was a great experience, and I felt like I was finally able to donate my efforts to a cause I believed in. With the help of a group of people who shared my beliefs, I was able to see a very positive result among a group of the student body. I will be continuing work on Hunger Lunch next year as the student chair, and I hope to help it continue to grow. Possibilities include making it a weekly event, getting a much bigger space to operate in, and increasing the publicity across campus. I know that, no matter what happens, I will be among a group of friends who believe that we can unite to help make a difference, no matter what size.