Hunger initiative puts students on road to Texas

Members of the Wichita State University Hunger Awareness Initiative will speak at the Ethical Student Leadership Conference on Saturday, Jan. 26, at Wiley College in Marshall, Texas.

Michelle Dreiling, Elliott School of Communication (ESC) graduate student and initiative president, and Pamela O’Neal, School of Nursing academic writing specialist, will attend the conference.

Initiative founder and ESC professor Deborah Ballard-Reisch, and ESC lecturer Jessica Freeman, as well as graduate student Jack Brand, will present via Skype.

They will speak about the responsibility to participate in the world discussion on ending hunger and present WSU’s Four-Pillar Campus Hunger Initiatives Model, created to enable colleges and universities build their own hunger awareness initiatives.

“We are so excited to share our model at the Ethical Student Leadership Conference in Texas,” Dreiling said. “It is an opportunity for us to help others outside of our area to more efficiently address the issue of hunger and avoid some of the stumbling blocks they may encounter if they were to start from scratch.”

Previous initiative efforts have focused on global and local hunger. In 2010, more than 3,000 volunteers came to the WSU campus and packaged more than 641,000 meals for Haitians displaced by the Jan. 12 earthquake. A campus food-packaging event in fall 2011 led to 21,000 meals packaged in less than two hours for Somali refugees in the Horn of Africa.

In 2011, the group emphasized campus hunger, distributing a survey throughout the WSU community. They also hosted three dinner and conversation events to discuss campus hunger. This fall, a campus-wide food drive collected more than 4,100 pounds of food, which was donated to the Kansas Food Bank.

Members of the initiative have presented their model at Southwestern College, Hutchinson Community College, the Kansas Hunger Dialogue and the Kansas Public Health Association Conference. In March, they will present at the Universities Fighting World Hunger Conference in Overland Park, Kan., and at the Pop Culture Association Conference Association in Washington D.C.

The WSU Hunger Awareness Initiative began in 2009 as a small group led by Ballard-Reisch. The mission of the group is to raise awareness of hunger and to investigate the nature and scope of hunger on the WSU campus and in the community.