The Blazer Kitchen uses refrigerators to store perishable items.Shopping at the Blazer Kitchen is just like shopping at a grocery store, with tall shelves housing hundreds of food items, from fruit juices to bread products, organized by type for shopping convenience. The key difference, however, is that Blazer Kitchen is a food bank, and these items are provided at no-cost to one of the UAB community’s most under-served populations: food-insecure students, employees, patients and their families.
In its two years on campus — at its Medical Towers and Hill Student Center locations — the Blazer Kitchen has served more than 156,300 meals to 650-plus students and nearly 575 employees and more than 10,000 meals to patients in UAB Medicine clinics. To make that possible, nearly 800 volunteers, including more than 550 students, volunteered 5,600-plus hours since March 2017.
Blazer Kitchen by the numbers
|
“The Blazer Kitchen is making a real-life impact on our campus and in our community,” said Lisa Higginbotham, manager of the UAB Benevolent Fund, which runs the food bank. “Watching that unfold over just a couple of years has been both humbling and inspiring — humbling because it shows just how much Blazers care about one another and inspiring because of the bright future of camaraderie and compassion it encourages for both UAB and Birmingham.”
A large component of the Blazer Kitchen’s student volunteer workforce comes from one place: The College of Arts and Sciences Department of Social Work, which requires undergraduate students to complete service-learning hours in upper-level courses. During the lab component for SW 422, “Social Work Practice II,” students learning to work alongside community organizations are required to volunteer 25 hours in Blazer Kitchen.
“It’s a wonderful experience for our students,” said Laurel Hitchcock, Ph.D., associate professor in the Department of Social Work. “They learn to apply values of social work, such as the dignity and worth of individuals, and they learn about confidentiality and privacy from employees and students who come into the Blazer Kitchen and how to respect people and reduce the stigma around food insecurity.”
|
“The Blazer Kitchen is making a real-life impact on our campus and in our community. Watching that unfold over just a couple of years has been both humbling and inspiring — humbling because it shows just how much Blazers care about one another and inspiring because of the bright future of camaraderie and compassion it encourages for both UAB and Birmingham.” |
A positive influence
Before the department began partnering with Blazer Kitchen a little more than a year ago, Hitchcock said students were responsible for finding their own service-learning placement in the community for the SW 422 lab credit. Now that the students are all volunteering at the Blazer Kitchen, she says they are reaping even more benefits and learning in new and different ways.
“It creates a kind of commonality among the students,” Hitchcock said. “It enriches classroom discussions, and students are learning about food insecurity — specifically on college campuses — and about the needs in our community. Plus, they’re learning to work in teams with other people.”
Cristal Toledo, a senior majoring in social work from Morelia, Mexico, who has volunteered in the Blazer Kitchen, says it’s been a great experience for her, both personally and professionally.
“Volunteering at the Blazer Kitchen will help me in the future as a social worker because I’m now aware of food insecurity and the many reasons a person might struggle with it,” she said. “Blazer Kitchen is important to every single client who walks in and is important to UAB’s campus.”
