The Pepperdine Volunteer Center and International Justice Mission are hosting the annual Week of Hunger and Homelessness through fundraising and volunteering events to engage the community beginning Monday and running through Saturday.
The week started Sunday at 9 p.m. with the International Justice Mission Kickoff Coffeehouse in the Sandbar. Convocation credit was offered for students and had more than 100 people attending.
“It was a great event last night at Coffeehouse,” said Estephania Gongora, the PVC’s development intern in charge of overseeing the week. “We highlighted many of the targets of IJM, stories about actual people who deal with hunger and homelessness and we prayed for different organizations that are helping in those efforts.”
On Monday, the Hunger Banquet was hosted with the help of Sodexo and Food Share. The biggest event of the week, the Hunger Banquet is a simulation in which the audience plays the role of different social classes while donating 20 to 25 cafeteria points to Food Share, an organization that receives food donations and distributes them to needy residents in Ventura County.
Students came into the Fireside Room at 6 p.m. and were randomly placed in different areas of the room: “Low Income,” “Middle Income” and “High Income.” Students placed in the low-income section were seated on cardboard mats on the ground and were given only small plates of rice to eat. The middle-income students, who were fewer in number than the first group, sat in chairs and ate bowls of rice and beans. Only three students were placed in the high-income section, where they ate at fancy tables and had a meal of chicken, seasoned vegetables and pink lemonade.
During the meal, senior and Program Coordinator for Food Share Dana Cargioli explained that there were more than 2.5 billion people hungry in the world and that hunger affects everyone, not just the poor.
“This event is a metaphor for how food and other resources are inequitably distributed in the world,” Cargioli said. “Everyone on earth has the same basic needs; it is only our circumstances — where we live and the culture into which we are born — that differ. Some of us are born into relative prosperity and security, while millions — through no choice of our own — are born into poverty.”
Jean Benitez, the donor relations manager from Food Share, explained how 40 percent of edible food ends up in landfills and is never that consumed. She explained Food Share accepts unwanted food like surplus cauliflower and frozen meat from farms and grocery stores and distributes it to low-income children and adults.
Students then shared their feelings about the simulated dinners. Taylor Baker, a freshman and IJM member, thought that it put things in a different perspective.
“I just walked in with my friend Leilani, and I thought, let’s just get dinner,” Baker said. “She grabbed a card and she’s in low income and I was excited when I saw my high income card… I looked around and there’s no one else at the table around me, and I’m enjoying this by myself. And I look at the low income, and they have such a community. And I think this demonstrates how society works, you know people get so consumed with being at the top and being wealthy that they forget others and lose that sense of community.”
By the time the event ended at 8 p.m., several students had tears in their eyes.
Other events for the week included the Hunger and Homelessness Fair yesterday, which was held in Joslyn Plaza from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. Students can also volunteer with Union Rescue Mission on Friday and Food Share on Saturday.
To participate for the Friday and Saturday volunteering events, RSVP online at www.pepperdine.edu/volunteercenter.
