Have you ever curiously wondered how the delicious Hunger Lunch tradition of rice, beans, & cornbread began? Well, it all started back in 2003 with Kelly Fogelmen, a UNC medical student. When conducting health assessments in a Nicaraguan orphanage one summer, she discovered that the children were lacking important nutritional components in their diets. She devised a solution to supply the community with a sustainable flock of hens that would lay eggs, which could provide food and also generate revenue.
However, she couldn’t just flick her want and “there be” chickens. The chickens would need to be purchased, as would chicken coops. Thus, she needed to develop a cheap and profitable enterprise, which has evolved into what we now dearly know as Hunger Lunch.
The basic gist of her model was to acquire food at low prices so as to provide students an affordable lunch that was both easy to facilitate, appealed to a wide mass, and profitable. The first implementation of this model ran on food supplied by the UNC hospital cafeteria and was served by student volunteers. By the end of the year, the students’ efforts had raised $2,500 in profits and enough to purchase 30 hens and construct a coop!
Having successfully run this model for a year, there arose the question of expansion. Sophomore pre-med student Sindhura Citineni picked up the project and launched the Hunger Lunch on UNC’s main campus. After having a first successful run, she and several other students joined together to enter a business plan competition for social ventures. Their goal was to launch the organization nationally; however they recognized that they did not have the skills to do so.
However, the group actively worked to to address both elements of progress in one fell swoop. First, they renamed the organization to Nourish International and established chapters on other campuses such as NC State and Duke. Next, they strengthened their cause by focusing on the revision of their fundamental mission. They decided that small groups of Nourish organizations could not tackle a world hunger problem, but they could, over time, build a national constituency for attacking the issue. In the summer of 2008, after having entered several competitions and earning prize money, Chapel Hill was able to host students from many campuses throughout the United States for a week-long program about Nourish, and in the Fall there were 23 Nourish chapters throughout the nation including Harvard, Stanford, and Yale.
Today, Hunger Lunch is still a thriving committee in the Nourish organization at UNC, and is held every Wednesday for $4. There are some exciting changes in the works for Hunger Lunch next semester, so stay tuned for more details!
Post written by Alexis Strang.
However, she couldn’t just flick her want and “there be” chickens. The chickens would need to be purchased, as would chicken coops. Thus, she needed to develop a cheap and profitable enterprise, which has evolved into what we now dearly know as Hunger Lunch.
The basic gist of her model was to acquire food at low prices so as to provide students an affordable lunch that was both easy to facilitate, appealed to a wide mass, and profitable. The first implementation of this model ran on food supplied by the UNC hospital cafeteria and was served by student volunteers. By the end of the year, the students’ efforts had raised $2,500 in profits and enough to purchase 30 hens and construct a coop!
Having successfully run this model for a year, there arose the question of expansion. Sophomore pre-med student Sindhura Citineni picked up the project and launched the Hunger Lunch on UNC’s main campus. After having a first successful run, she and several other students joined together to enter a business plan competition for social ventures. Their goal was to launch the organization nationally; however they recognized that they did not have the skills to do so.
However, the group actively worked to to address both elements of progress in one fell swoop. First, they renamed the organization to Nourish International and established chapters on other campuses such as NC State and Duke. Next, they strengthened their cause by focusing on the revision of their fundamental mission. They decided that small groups of Nourish organizations could not tackle a world hunger problem, but they could, over time, build a national constituency for attacking the issue. In the summer of 2008, after having entered several competitions and earning prize money, Chapel Hill was able to host students from many campuses throughout the United States for a week-long program about Nourish, and in the Fall there were 23 Nourish chapters throughout the nation including Harvard, Stanford, and Yale.
Today, Hunger Lunch is still a thriving committee in the Nourish organization at UNC, and is held every Wednesday for $4. There are some exciting changes in the works for Hunger Lunch next semester, so stay tuned for more details!
Post written by Alexis Strang.