With Sodexo’s Support, Campus Kitchens Grow in more than just Numbers

This Spring, the Campus Kitchen at Gonzaga University in Spokane, WA. harvested its first kale, potatoes, spinach, heirloom lettuce, and Walla Walla sweet onions from the Campus Kitchen garden inside a donated greenhouse.

Across the country, in Boston, the Campus Kitchen at University of Massachusetts Boston prepped elementary school students for the first harvest from their salsa garden, with a lesson on salsa prep from a local, master chef.

Both national Campus Kitchens are effectively using excess, available resources – from an empty greenhouse to a dormant, public school garden – to expand the reach of student-driven hunger relief in the community. Dig a little deeper, and find that these Campus Kitchens could not have blossomed in this way without the help of the Sodexo Foundation, a major funder of The Campus Kitchens Project.

Sodexo – who runs dining services at 9 of 25 Campus Kitchens including Gonzaga and University of Massachusetts Boston – goes beyond major financial support and unused food donations at each of the Campus Kitchens. Sodexo employees run workshops, provide recipes, train students on how to use equipment, and often help with outreach for new Campus Kitchens at Sodexo schools.

With all the help from a company that understands the backbone of meal service, Campus Kitchen coordinators can free up time and resources to start up campus gardens like the now flourishing salsa and greenhouse gardens that are providing fresh produce to the Spokane and Boston residents.

And with continuing Sodexo support, produce from these gardens will only get sweeter.