A Little About Us

The Campus Kitchen at Wake Forest is a Food Recycling program that uses cooked but never served food from the campus dining hall to make healthy and nutritious meals for the needy of our community. Our Campus Kitchen has quite a history. It grew out of a student run program called Homerun started by two Wake Forest Juniors in 1999. Karen Borchert and Jessica Jackson went on to start the national program called "The Campus Kitchens Project."

These two are high achievers! Did you know that recently in The Washingtonian, Karen was featured as one of DC's 40 People Under 40 to Watch? We're proud of Karen and Jessica for their awesome accomplishments. And as of fall 2007, there were 13 Campus Kitchens nationwide!

The hope of every Campus Kitchen is to find a way to fit into a community and meet needs using existing resources. Our Campus Kitchen here at Wake seems to be on the right track. Just one year after its inception (in the fall of 2006) over 5,000 meals had been delivered - and they weren't all just made from scratch. In fact, our program was flooded with help! Over 500 volunteers gave more than 2400 hours of their time, and helped us save 1500+ pounds of food. Not bad for the first year.

So who is behind all of this? The awesome part of the Campus Kitchen is that it is a student driven organization. Our Leadership Team holds weekly meetings, plans the meals, runs the shifts, trains new volunteers, advertises, plans events, raises funds, and is Kitchen certified. Not bad, huh? And during the semester the majority of our volunteers are students, too. To help tie it all together, each Campus Kitchen has one dedicated staff member. That would be the Campus Kitchen Coordinator. (And did you know that all the Coordinators are young, super-cool people? Although that's not technically a job requirement. It's also a great thing to do after college for a year or two!)

One last note: We've been very warmly received by everyone who learns about us, and we couldn't do this without this amazing support from our campus and local community. Students, staff, faculty, alumni, dining services, community partners, local restaurants, youth groups, local schools, and many more very important individuals and groups - thank you for all your help!

For more information you can listen to a 88.5 WFDD News Story (mp3 format) about the Campus Kitchen, or visit the National web site: http://campuskitchens.org/

If you have questions about volunteering, please first look at our Frequently Asked Questions page, then sign-up or e-mail us.