EMPTY BOWL PROJECT BATTLES HUNGER

 Published in the Asbury Park Press 4/10/2003 by Terry Gauthier Muessig

 Middletown – If all goes according to plan, students at Collier High School in Marlboro will be donating $1,100 to St. Mark’s Soup Kitchen in Keansburg.

 For the past six weeks, about 20 students in the Collier’s Service Learning Club have been making ceramic bowls.

 Tomorrow, students will travel to AT&T in Middletown with bowls for their yearly Empty Bowl community-service project.

 The company has partnered with the school to let the students sell the bowls to employees at AT&T’s cafeterias for $5 each from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m.

 In turn, the buyer will receive a voucher for a free bowl of soup from the AT&T facility’s food-services contractor Aramark.

 This is the seventh year the school has been doing this particular project and the first time the group has gone to AT&T.  In the past, the students have sold bowls at Monmouth Medical Center in Long Branch, a church in Red Bank, the Senior Citizens Activity Network in Monmouth Mall in Eatontown and at Prudential in Holmdel.

 “This is a record year,” said Liz DeLuca, a faculty adviser for the club.  Normally, the students only make about 100 bowls.  This year, the students made 220 bowls.

“Our kids wanted to raise awareness of hunger and raise money to feed the hungry in our community by selling their bowls,” DeLuca said.

One week prior to the sale, the students invited the senior citizens from CareOne in Holmdel to the school to help them paint the bowls before they were sent out to be fired. Judy Buncher, the activities director for CareOne, a subacute and skilled-care center, said the ladies who signed up for the program were delighted to help “their friends.”

 “We go to visit them twice a week,” said Sara Biechler, 14.  “I love it when I go to spend time with them.” According to Buncher, Sara calls all the ladies Oma, (grandma in German).For this project, Sara made seven bowls.

 When student began the project last month, Amy Miano, an assistant advisor, told student they could be creative in making the bowls. Although some people may think a soup bowl should be deep and round, the students decided to take Miano’s suggestion, and the bowls are quite ornate.

 In one of the bowls Sara created, one might think of the cereal Lucky Charms.  Inside the bowl, she had little shapes created from clay and painted each one a different color.

 Mark Jeacoma, 17, said his favorite color was green, and he likes the shapes of leaves, so he made a bowl in the shape of a leaf.

 “This is a really good idea,” said Ashely Clark, 19, as she was trimming her pink bowl with a green edge.  “It’s for a good cause.”

 Although most of the bowls created were not big enough to be considered a bowl of soup, Ashley said after she made her bowl it reminded her of something she would see at her grandma’s house.

 “The students are learning a skill and then serving the community,” said Jackie St. Angel, development director at the school.