Food for Thought: Hunger/Homelessness Awareness Week:

Food for thought: hunger/homelessness awareness week, November 15-20 is a new annual tradition at Northeastern Illinois University.  During this unique charitable event, three cans of food knocked off $5. worth of library fines with donations benefiting the Greater Chicago Food Depository. Custom bowls created by faculty artisans and painted by students were available Thursday, November 18 for only $5 with proceeds benefiting A Just Harvest, a local food pantry. Experiential learning activities included sleeping outside on-campus Wednesday, November 17th (with sponsors organized like a walk-a-thon), Wednesday's fasting in the cafeteria as well as Tuesday's Oxfam Hunger Banquet.  Each dynamic event has a unique charitable beneficiary.  This unusual social justice event -for a State University- began last year and is the brain child not of Mother Theresa but of Veronica Rodriguez who humbly credits her experience as a student at Loyola University as motivation for the event. Rodriguez is the Assistant Director of Student Activities at NEIU.

Interviewed in her basement office on Tuesday, November 9^th, Rodriguez's commitment to community is seen in her dedication to helping those less fortunate by putting the active in activism.  Rodriguez is an alumna of Loyola University, a wife and mother of two, who is on a mission to create an altruistic community in our state university.  This is no ordinary task, but Rodriguez is no ordinary woman.  So committed to this mission is she that last year she joined 15 other NEIU college students in sleeping outside in the rain.  This may not seem like much of a sacrifice, but when you take into consideration that Rodriguez was pregnant at the time, it takes her activism to a whole new level.

Aramark was the sponsor of Tuesday's Hunger Banquet, an Oxfam event that was also known as the social class dinner. Oxfam assists by providing different scripts by which to organize the event. The Hunger Banquet was designed to show the inequality of the world through the basics of food. Oxfam is a group of non-governmental organizations from three continents working to fight poverty and injustice worldwide.

 Rodriguez enthusiastically described the Hunger Banquet which costs participants a meager $5. each for an incredible edible learning experience:  

"Let's say we get 50 people, and there is 5% of the world who are upper class, so              many percent is middle class, so many percent is lower class, there are as many pieces of paper as there are participants.  Dinner guests draw a piece of paper as they come in, so if someone draws upper-class, that person gets a nice chicken meal with rolls, vegetables and a drink in a glass that is served on a table cloth.  If another person is middle class, then that person eats spaghetti, on a table with no table cloth and paper plates.  If someone gets lower class, then that person is eating rice and sitting on the floor.  The script goes something like, 'You are Miguel and you are a middle class worker.  Suddenly there's a  tsunami!  So, Miguel must move from middle class to lower class."

This way, dinner guests at the Hunger Banquet  were able to experience shifts in the economic inequity of the world first-hand through the very real medium of food.  The money acquired from the Hunger Banquet goes to Oxfam. Every activity had a charitable organization associated with it.  The Day of Fasting money on Wednesday went to the Greater Chicago Food Depository.  A new activity this year was called "empty bowls" the ceramic teachers in the fine arts building created a number of ceramic bowls that students painted on Wednesday. Thursday, these works of art were displayed and sold for $5.  

The library also ran a library debt forgiveness program. If a student owed library fines, 3 cans of food removed $5. worth of fines.  The library actually contacted all the people who owed fines and told them that to get their fines forgiven, they had only to bring so many cans of food. Last year, 80 cans were collected by the library and given to The Chicago Food Depository.

The United Greek Council is a consortium of Greeks organizations on campus that spearheads Greeks Give Back.  They raised money to sponsor an impoverished local family's Thanksgiving meal.  The money they raised ($40 per family) purchased a box of mashed potatoes, stuffing, cranberry sauce. and a turkey which Greek sorority sisters and fraternity brothers then bundled up during a packing party on Friday, and personally delivered  to needy families on Saturday.  FOOD FOR THOUGHT: HUNGER/HOMELESSNESS AWARENESS WEEK, was sponsored by the Student Activities Office, Aramark (our new food service vendor), the Ronald Williams Library and the Greek Council. 

Another of Rodriguez's brilliant ideas, is the Spring Break trips.  In the Spring Break trips students participate in social justice issues through hands-on activities.  Last year, they went to Texas for border patrol.  Given the violence in Juarez, Texas has been deemed "too violent" for the powers that be on the University, so the group is slated to go to Arizona for border patrol, to Oklahoma to work with the Cherokee Nation and to a South Shore CPS elementary school to improve community relations.  Rodriguez is still accepting participants for the South Shore Spring Break trip scheduled to happen between  March 20-26.  The trip is a cultural immersion project which requires participants stay over-night.  Last year's group camped out in a church basement. She noted that while the trip is free, a hundred dollars per person in fund-raising is necessary to help fund the projects which last year included painting the playground of the school and a school staircase.  NEIU Students are welcome to join Rodriguez in creating a stairway to a better world.