Poverty stimulation gathers numerous reactions from students and staff

AMY WILLEY

Staff Writer

This year’s Martin Luther King week was meant to be a week of celebration or a “week on” instead of a day off, and thus President Tracy appointed a five-member board, “The Martin Luther King Task Force,” to make sure that happened. As much as losing the day off bothered students, it didn’t compare to the controversy over the so called “poverty lunch.” The lunch was planned by the Martin Luther King Task force and carried out with the campus food service, Sodexho. Students were served their choice of chicken noodle or vegetarian op-tion soups and bread in exchange for a swipe of their meal plan card. The money generated was then to be do-nated to Community Café, a charity which provides free meals to people in the Alma community. Finally, the other food sources on campus such as Joe’s Place were closed in an attempt to ensure participation.

The goal, according to Rev. Christine Vogel, Alma College Chaplain, was to simulate forced poverty to give students a window into a different life in order to create what she calls “A comprehensive learning experience.” The result was not quite what the Task Force had in mind. According to rough estimates by Sodexho, that day around half of the usual more than 750 students showed up to lunch. According to Mark Starkweather, speaking for Sodexho, “The realization was that students boycotted the lunch,” he says, “It’s a fact.”

Students expressed other complaints ranging from feeling cheated out of money to alleging that Sodexho profited from the event. Sodexho denies the latter claim and, though not able to provide numbers on the costs, Starkweather asserts, “We broke even.” Starkweather reminds stu-dents that the evening of the event dinner opened an hour early, and was “Intended to be a celebration,” he says noting the extras–including a banana split bar–that were offered that night. He further explains, “In no way did we intend to offend the students,” he says, “and we were not meaning to violate a contract.”

Other students assert that it was more than the money, but the principle of the matter. These students say that donations should not be forced, but voluntary. Although stating that “People that are poor don’t have choices,” Vogel yields that “Perhaps we should have gone to Student Congress and gotten student opinions.” Both Rev. Vogel and Starkweather chalk the event up to a learning experience and according to Starkweather, “It was a noble cause that got lost in translation,” he says, “It’s not going to hap-pen this way again.”

Both Starkweather and Rev. Vogel encourage students to make sugges-tions about the simulation, including constructive criticism. Students with ideas about this event can get in touch with either Starkweather at Starkweather@alma.edu or Vogel at vogel@alma.edu or any of the other members of the Martin Luther King Task Force: vonwallmenich@alma.edu mueller@alma.eu navarro@alma.edu, or ritz@alma.edu. The Task Force is in the process of writing a report about the week’s success and is also designing a survey for students, although the date these will be made available is as of now unknown. Rev. Vogel thinks that the result will be positive, “I think overall the whole week was a success,” she says.

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