This Thanksgiving, a group of Northwestern students will cook up a large turkey dinner for some of Evanston’s neediest residents.
The Campus Kitchens Project, a college-based organization that serves food to the needy, started Turkeypalooza in Detroit to capitalize on the holiday season and get more people involved in community service, said Maureen Roche, director of the nationwide Campus Kitchens Project. More volunteers participate in the program during the Thanksgiving season because it serves as a natural bridge between the holiday season and the need to feed others in the community, Roche said.
“It’s something that we as an organization like to do, because these are people that may not have people to share the holidays with,” Roche said. “It’s a nice thing that we can do to be able to provide them with a bit of that holiday warmth.”
There are 25 Campus Kitchens participating in the event across the country, and while the event has not changed much, the organization is always hoping each individual group can get more people involved and personalize the event, she said.
The Campus Kitchens at NU, which has been hosting Turkeypalooza since 2003, serves clients either fully-cooked Thanksgiving meals or a basket of groceries so they can prepare the same food themselves, said Joanna Racho, CKNU program coordinator.
The group at NU serves turkey, green bean casserole, mashed potatoes, candied yams and pie, along with gravy and cranberry sauce, Racho said. Although their clients appreciate the Thanksgiving meal, student volunteers enjoy the event as well because they can prepare the food themselves, she said.
Campus Kitchens at NU typically takes extra food from University dining halls and delivers it to Evanston groups such as Connections for the Homeless and the McGaw YMCA every week. Turkeypalooza is special because volunteers can prepare specific foods on a menu using food collected at food drives instead of putting together what is left over from University dining halls, student leader Sheila Kredit said.
“We know exactly what kind of dinner we’re going to give them, whereas in our other meal shifts, it just depends what we’ve been given by the dining halls, so it can really be this piecemeal conglomeration of really random foods,” the Weinberg senior said. “So (TurkeyPalooza) is really specific, for a specific purpose.”
She also said the food is different because clients know it has been cooked recently instead of reheated after a meal at dining halls, making it mean more to them.
President and CEO of the McGaw YMCA Bill Geiger said there were “smiles and beaming eyes” when he was volunteering for Turkeypalooza last week and taking orders from residents in senior housing units. The men served by the YMCA appreciate the meals from Turkeypalooza because it shows they were remembered at Thanksgiving, he said.
“Many of these men do not have close family ties. Their family is the McGaw YMCA and the people who are kind and generous enough to remember them,” Geiger said. “It’s a real delight for many, many men who feel remembered, and they appreciate that on Thanksgiving Day.”
