ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Monday, December 23, 1996 TAG: 9612230104
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C-1 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: RADFORD
SOURCE: LISA APPLEGATE STAFF WRITER
`SKIP-A-MEAL' was organized by two Radford students, and helped raise about $3,000 for Second Harvest FoodBank in Roanoke.
It began with a beans-and-rice dinner on Radford University's campus, and led to nearly one-fourth of the student population giving up its lunch to fight hunger.
Two sophomore honors students, enrolled in a seminar on community development and volunteerism, wanted to take their studies to a practical level. They organized "Skip-a-Meal" and convinced 1,700 students to "donate" a lunch from their meal plans Friday.
At $1.80 per meal, the two raised about $3,000. The university will donate that to Second Harvest FoodBank in Roanoke, which provides food supplies for needy people throughout Southwestern Virginia.
"We had the theory to talk about, but this was the practice," said Eric Bucey. "You can't really learn things until you get to do it yourself."
Bucey and Dannah Card developed Skip-a-Meal on their own. But their interest in fighting hunger was piqued in Nelda Pearson's seminar.
Pearson, a professor of sociology and anthropology, had her class volunteer in a rural community, travel to a national conference, and start a weekly beans-and-rice supper.
Donations from those meals, which sometimes drew 30 people, went to Our Daily Bread soup kitchen in Radford.
"It almost became a little family - students came every week, and I really got to learn about their lives," Pearson said.
Card and Bucey, whom Pearson calls "truly exceptional and dedicated," became so enthused by that small effort, they wanted to find a larger project to tackle.
Other groups such as service fraternities have held Skip-a-Meals in years past, but Pearson said she can't remember a time when two students organized it on their own.
The two recruited friends to staff tables in the two university cafeterias. One cafeteria sits in Muse Hall, the tall dorm at the north end of campus. Bucey figures they got most of the 750 Muse residents to sign up in the first three days.
Since exams ended Friday and many students had left for the holiday, Bucey said, it wasn't too difficult to give up that last dorm meal.
"We wanted to do something to kind of make people think about hunger and this was kind of detached from the whole experience of hunger," he said.
But it did raise quite a bit for Second Harvest and food banks near the university. Bucey said they want half of the proceeds to go directly to the Radford and Pulaski food banks.
Next semester, he wants to continue to make more beans and rice.
"It'll be aimed at raising money, but we want it to be a place where people gather and kind of illuminate each other about their commonalities," he said.
Bucey, who plans to study English and sociology, isn't sure what job he'll aim for when he graduates.
"I don't have a definite, but now I have a direction."
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