Written by Temilolu Fayomi, Ohio Campus Compact’s Student Resource Center Coordinator at the University of Akron 

For our MLK day service project, we wanted to create meal bags that would be distributed at our grab-and-go locations across campus. Not all students have time or a need to utilize the full services of our cupboard, but they still need food for one meal or a day, that is when they utilize our grab and go locations. We recognized that many students had the same need for hygiene, they needed enough to get by, but not our full services, so we packaged travel-size hygiene bags as well. With the help of our volunteers, we were able to package more than 50 of each bag to be distributed at our grab and go locations.

This MLK event was special too because it had been rescheduled 3x due to the inclement weather. We were still able to host the event and exceed our goal of bags packaged.

For our MLK day service project we wanted to create meal bags that would be distributed at our grab and go locations across campus. Not all students have time or a need to utilize the full services of our cupboard, but they still need food for one meal or a day, that is when they utilize our grab and go locations. We recognized that many students had the same need for hygiene, they needed enough to get by, but not our full services, so we packaged travel size hygiene bags as well. To help kickstart this, Anna and Temi helped to write the grant for our service day project and lay out the general details for the project. Once our service project was fleshed out, Morgan chose the food items for the meal bags, and all the materials were ready, our service project was rolled into motion. With the help of our volunteers on Friday, January 21st, we were able to package more than 50 of each bag to be distributed at our grab and go locations in less than 3 hours!

On Monday, Jan 17th Americorps service member, Anna, participated in the virtual session for the Imagine Art class which was part of AmeriCorps National Service Day Activities.

On Thursday, Jan 27th, we had interest from local high schoolers to volunteer with the cupboard. We made a continuation of our MLK day event on Friday and packed more hygiene bags with our high school volunteers over 2.5 hours. We even gained some additional volunteers to help us out!