The Campus Kitchen at Washington and Lee University Wins Online Service Award
The Campus Kitchen at Washington and Lee University (CKWLU) was awarded $1,000 in the national online True Hero™ Competition.
CKWLU was one of the top seven winners of the initial True Hero™ competition, which had 54 student community service projects posted from 32 colleges. Truehero.org, which is a showcase for community service projects on the Internet, went live in early 2009. Over 21,000 people have voted for one of the service projects posted on the website, and over 6,500 have viewed a service project video linked to YouTube.
“A member of our student leadership team, Sarah Thornsberry, discovered this opportunity for us,” said Jenny Sproul, coordinator of The Campus Kitchen at W&L. “It has been incredible to see how much support we received with this project, and we’re thrilled to be a recipient of a $1,000 grant.”
CKWLU is a service organization that uses surplus food collected from campus dining services, catering operations and donations, and then provides nutritious and tasty meals to those in need in the Rockbridge County area.
The organization works with nine agencies in the Rockbridge area providing meals to Habitat for Humanity homes, the Robert E. Lee Hotel apartments, the Manor at Natural Bridge, Rockbridge Area Hospice, Project Horizon, the Lexington City Office on Youth’s afterschool program, the Rockbridge Area Occupational Center, Magnolia Center and Waddell Head Start. The food they cook and deliver is based on the needs of each agency.
The Campus Kitchen at Washington and Lee was started by Ingrid Easton ’06. After completing her internship in the Shepherd Poverty Program, part of which was working at the Campus Kitchens Project national headquarters in Washington D.C., she believed she had found her calling–to start a non-profit to help the needy. Easton spent her senior year creating and organizing a Campus Kitchen on the W&L campus.
