Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi English Class Project Leads to New Walk-in Refrigeration Unit for Food Bank
Students wrote proposal for $47,000 grant from Kraft Corporation

A term project by a senior English class at Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi has earned the participating students high marks while raising their social consciousness and greatly benefiting the Food Bank of Corpus Christi.

Recently the Food Bank, which serves an 11-county area within the Coastal Bend, received word that the Kraft Corporation had approved a $47,000 grant request to provide the non-profit organization with a walk-in refrigeration unit to store much-needed perishable items. The grant, awarded as part of Kraft’s Community Nutrition Program, was written by students in Dr. Charles Etheridge’s Seminar in Professional Writing class during the spring 2005 semester and submitted at the request of Bea Hanson, director of the Food Bank of Corpus Christi.

When completed just prior to the holidays, the refrigeration unit will be 20 feet wide, 22 feet long and 16 feet high, large enough for the Food Bank to provide an additional 230,000 pounds of perishable items per year to the 160 Coastal Bend organizations which distribute food directly to those in need. According to Hanson, the storage unit will allow the Food Bank to expand its focus from just alleviating hunger to also teaching people about proper preparation of nutritionally-healthy meals.

“We receive most of our perishable items from H-E-B which will now be able to provide double the amount of perishable items they contribute each day because we will have the capacity to process and distribute items such as dairy, meat and fresh vegetables,” said Hanson. “For every dollar provided by the Kraft Grant will be able to increase out yearly distribution by 10 pounds.”

For the 12 students in Etheridge’s class, the experience of writing and applying for a grant taught them valuable skills to take into the workforce. Those skills, Etheridge said, will make them more marketable after graduation because grant writers are needed in many professional areas including hospital administration, universities and non-profit relief agencies that are becoming more dependent on grants as government continues to cut aid at the same time the country’s poverty rate is on the rise.

Etheridge pointed out that doing the research required for the grant application also increased the students’ awareness about the reality of hunger in the world’s most prosperous nation.

“Their research to justify the grant showed them that those going hungry aren’t necessarily just the ones you’d think they’d be. Among the people who depend on the Food Bank for assistance are the unemployed, under-employed and the working poor such as military personnel who do not get paid enough to feed their families properly,” he said. “The students feel an enormous sense of accomplishment. One of the things we want students to get out of college is that they have a responsibility of engaged citizenship, of giving back to the community.”