The Community Plate Club just reached a major milestone: donating 10,000 pounds of excess cafeteria food to the Whosoever Gospel Mission, a homeless shelter off Germantown Avenue. This amount is equal to 8,500 meals, and was only achieved through the consistent donation of 100-200 pounds of food each week by the club members. With this accomplishment, they are now trying to expand in the hopes of increasing their donations to the mission and expanding their impact in the community.

The Whosoever Gospel Mission is an organization that houses homeless men taking part in their long term addiction recovery and job readiness program. The men live there for six to nine months and work on everything from “their education, to life skills, to addiction recovery, counseling issues, and working on their professional and vocational development,” said Heather Rice, the executive director at the Whosoever Gospel Mission. After learning these skills the men will find work and eventually save up to move into their own apartment, which is when they officially graduate from the mission.

The cost to sustain the organization is large.

“It costs us $1.9 million a year to do what we do,” said Rice. “We don’t get any government funds at all, and so we have to raise that money.”

Everything that the organization uses for the mission comes from donations, like food donations, some of which, when large enough, are able to lessen their expenditures.

The organization provides 60 people with three meals a day, along with various snacks available 24/7, so the continuous donations from the club have been able to lessen some of what it would cost to buy that much food. The organization has been able to supplement some of the meals that they would have otherwise been buying with the food that the club has provided.

Club members usually deliver the food on Thursday and is often served for meals on Friday. However, this has not only helped with the organization’s expenditures but also impacted the people as well. “The guys get really excited about Friday dinner because it’s always something super special.”

“It could be, you know, chicken tikka masala or something, it could be Thai noodles,” said Rice. “Every Tuesday night we have shepherd’s pie because we do, but to have the mix up on Friday of just whatever amazing thing they bring over is super cool and encouraging and exciting.”

To increase their food donations and impact, the club recently but a hydroponic garden.

Hydroponic gardening is a method of growing plants without soil and instead using a nutrient solution.

In a hydroponic garden, the plants are placed in a pipe system and suspended over the nutrient solution, absorbing minerals and water directly from their roots. The garden is inside, in a temperature controlled environment that allows for plants to grow all year round. The hydroponic garden the club built resides in the Middle School, and is now completing a trial run, “growing mustard greens, arugula, spinach and lettuce,” said junior Damian Melzer-Surkan.

The garden’s main purpose is to provide vegetables for the Whosoever Gospel Mission, and any vegetables grown will contribute to the amount of excess cafeteria food that is being donated at the end of each week.

Currently, the garden’s expected output will be small, since the garden itself is a small unit. Julie Knutson, the club’s faculty advisor, has stated that she believes it will only be enough to “supplement the salvaged food with fresh produce.” However, one of the club members, junior Leo Cohen, has built a modular system which offers a lot of flexibility and scalability with the garden. “So there are opportunities for expansion with it,” said Knutson.

The club heads juniors Judah Meyer and Damian Melzer-Surkan, have taken a lot of initiatives with the garden and are currently trying to implement it in various aspects of the SCH community.

Since the garden resides in the Middle School, one of the club’s current goals is to create a program to teach Middle School students how to take care of it and plant, cultivate, and harvest the vegetables grown.

The Middle School Eco Club would likely lead the initiative. Meyer and Melzer-Surkan are also hoping to have the Summerside cooking camps make use of the vegetables that will have grown by the end of this year, so they don’t go to waste over the summer.

After constructing the garden, some club members have begun a new initiative as well. Cohen and junior Logan Kirkpatrick are now working on the design for a more sustainable and inexpensive hydroponic garden involving the use of recycled plastics and solar panels.

“Part of the garden is 3-D printed, and there’s a way that we can upcycle wasted 3-D prints and other types of plastic, and then actually print the inserts that we use in the garden out of that recycled plastic,” said Cohen.

The plastic that will replace parts of the hydroponic garden, like the pipes for the water and plants, will come from the unsuccessful 3-D prints from the CEL Innovation or Robotics labs. This will likely reduce the plastic waste generated by those labs. Additionally, to promote green energy, “We’re trying to power it with solar panels,” said Melzer-Surkan.

An inexpensive hydroponic garden design will help our school with sustainability efforts and, hopefully, incentivize other schools to create their own hydroponic garden and possibly create a chapter of Community Plate in the process.

The club has been working toward creating Community Plate chapters at other schools. As a step towards that, Meyer and Melzer-Surkan led a workshop on food insecurity and sustainable initiatives at Abington Friends School on their Martin Luther King Day of Service. They presented “with the intent of getting interest and potentially starting a chapter of community plate at their school,” said Meyer. And with a cheaper design for the hydroponic garden, “We can send out those designs to other schools that are trying to start a similar initiative,” said Cohen, which will make it easier to create a chapter in the future.

Building an additional, more sustainable hydroponic garden is a project for the future; however, Meyer and Melzer-Surkan are now trying to expand outside of school to receive even more donations.

Meyer and Melzer-Surkan plan on visiting local food and restaurant businesses on Germantown Avenue in the hopes of attaining a partnership and getting donations their excess food. This endeavor has “the double purpose of keeping food out of landfills, from producing methane and other greenhouse gasses, and also helping solve hunger in our community,” said Knutson.

To make advertising and partnership easier, junior Quinton McDonnell and myself, sophomore Clare Murphey, are designing a Community Plate website that will allow users to track the amount of food donated, watch a live video feed of the hydroponic garden, and partner with the club and volunteer to help pack and transport food to the Whosoever Gospel Mission.

As the second year of the club’s existence, its members have accomplished a lot and are gearing toward an even more impactful path.

Knutson believes that the extent to which they can take the club and its current projects is “a matter of the limits of their imagination. They will find faculty at this intersection of robotics and engineering, at food services, and CEL, who are very eager to support their work. So, really, I do think the sky’s kind of the limit.”