The Bloomfield Hills Schools annual Food Drive was underway and falling short of expectations, leaving the district Community Service Coordinator looking for ways to make up the shortfall. I told her my Ceramics students could help. I had absolutely no idea how but it seemed like a good idea. My wife, Lisa Blackburn and I decided to challenge my students to make enough ceramic bowls to host a meal for the staff at the local High School. They enthusiastically agreed to help and by collaborating threw 120 bowls, decorated the bowls and assisted with the firings. On the day of the luncheon, the students washed the bowls and set up a beautiful display in the media center. They put all of the bowls on one table so each staff member could select one for the simple meal of soup and bread. Students collected the donations, served the soup and helped straighten up the room. At the conclusion of the meal, Lisa and I shared with the participants information about hunger in our community, thanked each person for their cash donation and asked each of them to keep the empty bowl they had selected as a reminder of all the empty bowls in the world.

Silence fell over the room as everyone immediately felt the power of their bowl as a metaphor for hunger in the world. Tears were evident on many faces. Bowls were clutched to chests. The arts had, as is often the case, served in a powerful way to transform.  It was magic—absolute magic! We knew something amazing happened. It was apparent that we had been presented with an amazing gift and a great responsibility. What we thought would be a one-time event would not end there. We pledged to share this incredible tool with others.

Over the next few months we developed an information packet about our creation, The Empty Bowls Project. Lisa developed the design for the materials and we began to distribute the packet to potters, educators, community centers and to every other person and place we could think of. Still not aware of how successful the project would be, we designed it to last several months and to end on World Food Day, October 16, 1991. Our goal was to raise $1,000,000 nationwide. As reports began to come in, several things started to be very clear: The project worked. People in many states were holding Empty Bowls meals and were raising money; we designed the project so that money would be used to fight hunger in the community where it was raised—nothing came to us! People reported that they intended to hold events every year. Most importantly, people loved the spirit that the project helped create. The metaphor of an empty bowl was immediately clear to everyone attending an event—and taking home a tangible reminder of the energy and purpose of the event in the form of a beautiful ceramic bowl was thrill for everyone involved.

Once we accepted that the project had clearly developed a life of its own, we also accepted the responsibility of nurturing it. We spoke about Empty Bowls at art conferences, teachers meetings, pottery workshops, and service learning gatherings. We sent publicity materials to newspapers, radio and television stations, and magazines. We sent out literally thousands of information packets in response to requests from every state in the country. We sought and received 800 student-made bowls and, working with Oxfam America presented a bowl and an information packet to every member of Congress. We used Empty Bowls at the Oxfam Mickey Leland Memorial Hunger Banquet in Washington, DC. The following year, Oxfam allowed us to participate again at their Hunger Banquet, this time at the United Nations. We served soup to over 1000 participants at the National Youth Leadership Council National Service Learning Conference in Detroit. The Unitarian Universalist Church has held Empty Bowls events at two General Assembly national conferences. At each event they raised nearly $20,000 that was donated to food providers in the city where the conference was held. At least seven state art education associations have held events at their annual conferences.

Literally hundreds of thousands of students have participated in Empty Bowls events making this project perhaps the largest service learning activity in the country. Kids happily give away their own artwork because they want to help make a difference. Helping a student identify, strengthen and utilize his or her own voice—what more could an educator do for a child? Presenting a child with the feeling of empowerment should be at the heart of every lesson in every school every day.

We had one focus when we started The Empty Bowls Project. Raise all the money we could. Our understanding of the issues surrounding hunger and food security was very limited. We were ceramic educators and artists. We were not hunger advocates. It was our remarkable naiveté that allowed us to believe we could start a national hunger project. As The Empty Bowls Project has spread across the United States and beyond, our understanding has grown considerably. We now know that money alone will never end hunger. There will never be enough Empty Bowls meals to feed everyone. The Boy Scouts will never hold enough canned food drives, restaurants will never donate enough excess food, and food banks cannot possibly receive enough food from producers to feed all the people needing assistance. But we must never stop doing these vital things. We must do them and we must do more.

Our role has changed. We continue to be advocates for The Empty Bowls Project but that work is now shared by literally thousands of people who are helping the project grow in a wonderful grassroots manner. They are collectively doing far more than we could have ever imagined possible and the project continues to grow in amazing ways. We like to think of ourselves now as community activists utilizing the arts for positive and lasting social change. We have taken a leadership role in creating an annual statewide anti-hunger campaign here in Michigan called A Place at the Table World Food Day Campaign. We have joined the Building Bridges Network, a group of representatives from some forty or fifty hunger-fighting organizations, to work on this campaign. We have relied heavily upon the United States National Committee for the World Food Day to develop our goals. We share their belief that we must mobilize the whole of society in the work to end hunger. We are striving to increase awareness, understanding, information, services, support, advocacy, networking and impact. We have created five major components of the campaign this year: A Press Conference on the steps of the State Capital Building, A Restaurant Partnership Program, A Richie Havens Concert, A lobbying campaign aimed at state legislators, and an on-going Hunger Educators Project

The Hunger Educators Project has the potential of creating a huge positive impact. We are expecting 100 K-12 and college educators from all areas of the curriculum to participate. They will be invited to attend the annual State Hunger Conference and presented with a resource kit includes Finding Hunger Solutions: Kids Can Make a Difference; a subscription to the KIDS Newsletter; an information packet about The Empty Bowls Project; an issue of Hope magazine featuring a special section on food; an issue of In Context magazine with a special feature on Good Harvest; a bibliography of appropriate books on hunger, food security, service learning; a list of websites; a list of music focusing on hunger and other social justice issues; and anything else we can think of that will be of interest to the educators and their students. There will be no official lesson plan. Educators will be asked to develop and utilize a lesson or project about hunger in their classroom. We will attempt to gather information about these lessons and projects to compile archive materials we can share with additional educators as the project continue in the future.

The name of the campaign has a double meaning. As we hope to provide a place at the table for everyone to have adequate food, we also are inviting everyone to their place in helping end hunger. Hunger need not exist. More than enough food is produced to feed every person on the planet. It is poverty that causes hunger and poverty that we must end. Thirty four thousand children will die today from hunger and hunger-related diseases. Another 34,000 will die tomorrow and every day until we demand that it end. Public will must be changed. Our collective story must become one in which every person has access to food and other basic human rights. We must together dream a new story that provides for all.

A word of caution might well be in order here. As you continue your important work with children, be alerted that at any moment the overwhelming forces of good working all about you could capture you. What you think will be a little service project with a few kids could change your life. We know. It happened to us.

John Hartom and Lisa Blackburn are the co-founders of The Empty Bowl Project and The Imagine/Render Group. Blackburn is the manager of The Education Studio at the Detroit Institute of Arts. Hartom is a recently retired art educator currently serving as director of Imagine/Render Group. They may be reached at ImagineRen@aol.com.

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