On December 1st, our group successfully launched our first event as the Crunch Time Cooking Team. We have been working the past few weeks in the Leadership Lab provided by the Barger Leadership Institute on a pertinent issue on campus we’d like to address through an advocacy project. Our group decided to tackle off-campus dining as this is a concern of many students who struggle with cooking and choosing healthy options while juggling all of the responsibilities of university life.
We partnered with the University of Michigan’s Cooking Club to co-host an evening filled with information on off-campus dining, round table discussions about common student experiences with food, and a cooking demonstration with healthy and easy tacos. It went very smoothly and we were so glad with the student turnout as well as level of engagement. In the first part of the evening, we shared vital resources we felt have not been adequately distributed to students, such as resources on where to buy groceries and how to properly prepare meals in advance for the week. We then distributed handmade recipes booklets and pamphlets for later reference so that after the event, students can still learn and increase their awareness on dining resources. In the next part of the event, we split students into groups to talk about their personal experiences, and to no surprise, found that many shared the same insecurities and issues relating to time, budget, and lack of knowledge. We want to hopefully use this information as research for future endeavors, such as working with Beyond the Diag to add information on their website. For the last portion of the event, we shared the South Quad kitchen space with the Cooking Club in order to add an interactive portion. Students had a chance to make tacos with tasty vegetables and guacamole. Overall, it was a great night and our team is very proud with how everything unfolded.
We did have some challenges prior to this event, however, we were able to overcome most of them. In the beginning, we weren’t sure how we could relay all of information in an enticing format that would motivate students to pay attention and to also want to spread their new knowledge to other students. We went back and forth with a powerpoint to a discussion to a blog. On reflecting on a BLI habit, we wanted to think big, but also think small with the constraints of the Leadership Lab. Our group is very pleased with how we found a happy medium by co-hosting an event. It took away some of the responsibility of event logistics and scheduling. We were then able focus on the execution of our all of the valuable information we gathered.
We also wanted to take a moment to thank the Barger Leadership Institute faculty, staff, and students for their support and guidance throughout this semester. We also would like to thank BLI for awarding us a grant in order to end our project on such a meaningful and impactful note!
By: Grant Dukus, Alexis Schachter, Ellie Grupenhoff, Nuzhat Choudhury, Irina Kopyeva
