50,000 and Counting
Tonight at the Glasgow Community Center, the Campus Kitchen at Washington and Lee program will serve its 50,000th meal. What a milestone!
CKWL began in 2006, founded by then-senior Ingrid Easton. It has grown by leaps and bounds in the years since and is now a model for the Campus Kitchen program nationally.
In 2006 CKWL served 2,675 meals compared with a year ago (calendar 2009) when it served 17,328 meals. The number of volunteer hours over that time has climbed from 816 in 2006 to 4,279 in 2009. In addition, the program recovered 1,658 pounds of food in 2006 when it began and had increased that to a whopping 31,803 in 2009 (thanks, in large part, to a new relationship with WalMart).
If you missed it, CKWL was featured on WDBJ-TV in Roanoke last month for its backpack initiative at Natural Bridge School. CKWL volunteers load the backpacks with food each week and the schools then distributes the backpacks to students who are on the reduced-lunch program at Natural Bridge.
CKWL is celebrating its 50,00th meal with a 5K run on March 20. You can find details here.
Meantime, congratulations to Jenny Sproul, Class of 2008 and coordinator of CKWL, and all the volunteers over the years who have gotten the program to this point.
