2023 South Cumberland Summer Meal Program
What do six University of the South undergrads, two seminarians from the School of Theology, a 17-year-old St. Andrew’s-Sewanee School student, and a 63-year-old retired teacher have in common?
They, along with seven others, came together as strangers in early June and worked together for eight weeks to deliver nearly 30,000 meals to children in Grundy and Franklin Counties as part of the 2023 South Cumberland Summer Meal Program (SCSMP).
“Our program, which has been in operation for nine years, aims to reduce childhood hunger in Sewanee and surrounding areas by providing free meals during the summer months of June and July,” said South Cumberland Plateau VISTA Project Director Stephanie Colchado Kelley. “This is a time of year when the safety net of K-12 school programs takes a break and is correlated with increased child food insecurity on the South Cumberland Plateau.”
Through the Office of Civic Engagement’s AmeriCorps and AmeriCorps VISTA programs, the seventeen Summer Associates came together not only to assemble a week’s worth of grab-and-go lunches per child but also to transport and distribute the meals weekly at thirteen sites across the two-county area ranging from Beersheba Springs to Sherwood, Tennessee.
This experience profoundly impacted many of them, including the University of the South’s Stewart Miller, C’25, a junior majoring in history and a Bonner Leaders Fellow.
“My summer service with AmeriCorps offered me the opportunity to serve communities around Sewanee and learn more about the Plateau we all call home,” Miller said. “I am a firm believer that the best way to initiate any kind of change is by doing a lot of small things and letting such actions build up. Service, at its basest level, is an expression of love and respect. This sense of love and respect for my neighbors on the South Cumberland Plateau is at the heart of AmeriCorps’ work.”
For Beth Riner, 63, a recent retiree to Monteagle, serving with the summer meal program allowed her to learn more about the community she now calls home and to help find her place in it.
“This summer through AmeriCorps, I had the opportunity to help at Morton Memorial Methodist Church’s monthly food distribution,” she said. “I was so impressed with the work those folks are doing that I continued volunteering with them after my service ended.”
Riner was also struck by the passion shown by her much younger AmeriCorps cohort.
“It’s inspiring—and reassuring—to see that level of commitment to public service,” she noted. “It makes me feel good about the future.”
This year, for the first time, SCSMP participated in Grundy County’s Back to School Bash, a drive-through event where families pick up backpacks filled with school supplies; Grundy County Health Council sponsors the annual event. Service members persisted through five hours of very rainy weather to distribute 3,595 meals to more than 700 local children.
Bad weather isn’t the only challenge to running a successful meal program. It’s even more complicated by summer heat, delivery logistics, and transportation time, especially to the farthest sites.
To meet these challenges, SCSMP turned to Sewanee Datalab, a summer fellowship program, also based at the University of the South.
Self-described as “Data Science for Social Good,” the program engages university students from across the country to solve real-world social impact problems.
“We put our heads together with Datalab,” Colchado Kelley said, “We wanted to find a solid method to demystify the process of forecasting how many meals are needed at a given site on a given day. We’ve learned over the years that there are more variables than meet the eye.”
These variables include local population pockets, historical participation at meal sites, transportation distance between sites, weather, community health events, and recreational events, like festivals.
Summer Associates refined data collection methods, digitized eight years’ worth of paper form data, and helped sort and fix data validation issues. University students Mollie McWhorter, C’25, and Jessie Atkinson, C’24, took lead roles in organizing these tasks for the Datalab collaboration.
McWhorter, a junior majoring in history, is headed to Ecuador this semester to study Food Systems: Agriculture, Sustainability, and Justice through the International Honors Program.
Atkinson, a Richmond, Virginia native majoring in international and global studies, wanted to give back to her Sewanee community this summer. “I have seen the effects of food deserts and areas lacking access to important and vital resources around Virginia,” says the University senior, “Our work allowed Datalab to create a tool to predict the amount of meals needed each week. This tool will help SCSMP continue to combat food insecurity.”
After eight weeks of 40-hour per week service, it’s safe to say that these seventeen individuals are no longer strangers. An experience in service can transform our communities, our relationships, and ourselves. For these 2023 Summer Associates, the impact of their service will remain.
