As planned by organizers of the bowl-a-thon held at Crookston High School, the art room there was bustling with potters for about five hours on Saturday. What they didn't anticipate was the overwhelming turnout of volunteers.
“This really exceeded our expectations,” said Katya Zepeda, a first-year student at the University of Minnesota, Crookston, who received a Carter Academic Service Entrepreneur (CASE) grant to help plan and implement the innovative service-learning project designed to create hunger awareness. “We thought we'd be making most of the bowls on our own, but we haven't even had a chance to make many ourselves.”
Approximately 60 people, from children to older adults, showed up to take their turn at one of eight potter's wheels set up or hand build a bowl, with the goal of creating some 200 bowls. Sixty had been made previously, which added to the 194 made on Saturday leaves the project 54 more than they hoped for.
The project
The bowl-a-thon is one of three main components to the project, Zepeda explained. The greenware bowls will all be fired in the CHS kilns and, on April 17, the public is invited back to the art room from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. for a glaze-a-thon to finish the pottery.
“The people who made these bowls know that they will not necessarily be glazing their own,” said Lisa Loegering, assistant director of service learning at UMC and project co-coordinator. “We hope to have even more people come to the glaze-a-thon and put their own personal touches on the bowls.”
The capstone event of the project will be the Empty Bowls Dinner, to be held at UMC in the fall, with proceeds benefitting the Crookston area food shelf.
Sonia Spaeth, UMC art instructor, Gary Stegman, CHS art instructor, and Jenn Steinbrink, owner of the Krazy Kiln, are also community partners in the project. The wheels, of various heights and configurations, came from their departments and business.
Hunger awareness is not the sole goal of the project, though. Zepeda, a CHS graduate and organizational psychology major, said it's also about bringing the whole community together for a common cause. With her keen interest in youth and art, she and Loegering put their minds together to come up with this project, which has CHS and UMC students coming together with community members.
“We've been working with a group of high school students who we've taken to UMC campus to see the art room there and other parts of the campus,” she said. “We're also visiting the Care & Share Center to show how hunger and homelessness can affect people. They're all helping to plan this. We want kids to feel like they're part of the community while also exposing them to the UMC campus.”
