A Week at Wake: Sunday

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The only thing missing from students’ schedules on Sunday? Classes.

At noon, the field hockey team trounces Boston College 2-1 in Kentner Stadium. Next door, hikers returning from an Outdoor Pursuits backpacking trip to the mountains spill out of a van to air out their tents. By the water tower, intramural teams are playing flag football.

And everywhere, it seems, you can spot people huddled over laptops, fanning out from Z. Smith Reynolds Library to the Quad, Farrell Hall’s living room and beyond.

One handful of students is harder to find. Tucked into the back corner of a parking lot just off of Polo Road is a side door, nearly obscured by dumpsters. Inside, Campus Kitchen’s Sunday night cook team quickly whips up pasta with shredded beef marinara in the University’s catering kitchen. The meal will go to volunteers the next day at the DEAC Clinic, which School of Medicine students run for people who can’t afford health insurance and don’t qualify for government assistance.

Shift Leader Emma Lincks, a senior majoring in Health and Exercise Science, guides the team through the recipe, confident in the training she received a month earlier. They cook the beef in a giant skillet while boiling pasta in an industrial size pot; within an hour, they have packed to-go boxes in the refrigerator (with salads and fruit) and done the dishes.

“I saw Emma is a shift leader this year, so I signed up to work with her,” says Samantha Servin, also a senior. Last year, the duo did pick-ups together from The Fresh Market, one of Campus Kitchen’s community partners. The group’s goal is to collect food that otherwise would have gone to waste and share it with people who need it.

Juniors Mariama Bojang and Rosa Choi have joined them to fulfill a volunteer requirement for a sociology class in health inequality, through which they are learning about food insecurity in Winston-Salem. “I came for my class, but I think I will continue,” says Bojang, who grew up in the Bronx but was born in Gambia.

Campus Kitchen’s roots go back to 1999, when friends Jessica Jackson Shortall (’00) and Karen Stephan Borchert (’00) started Home Run, a student organization preparing meals for Winston-Salem residents in need. Home Run evolved into Campus Kitchen, and Shortall helped expand it to dozens of college campuses across the country. Wake Forest’s Campus Kitchen may be best known for TurkeyPalooza, through which untold numbers of undergrads have cooked several hundred Thanksgiving meals a year for people in need.

On this Sunday night in September, the students finish cleaning up and turn off the lights. Henry O’Malley, a sophomore from Chicago and co-leader of the shift, shuttles them back to campus in a van that will make several runs to local grocery stores to pick up surplus groceries the next day.