School of Nursing Students host the Hunger Banquet in Health Sciences Learning Center

Jessica Luckason

Bethany Ann Welnak

On the day before Thanksgiving 2004, nursing students gathered to participate in a banquet of a different kind. Led by undergraduate nursing students Bethany Ann Welnak and Jessica Luckason, the group joined together in the Oxfam America Hunger Banquet, held in the Health Sciences Learning Center (HSLC), to share food—inequitably—and to raise awareness of poverty and hunger through discussion.

The Hunger Banquet is held annually the end of November on college campuses across the United States. The brainchild of Oxfam America—a Boston-based international development and relief agency founded in 1970—it symbolizes the inequitable distribution of world resources that results in global poverty and hunger.

N322: Where idea for banquet germinated

Welnak and Luckason’s efforts to hold the Hunger Banquet took shape in Nursing 322, a community health nursing course taught by Rachel Rodriguez, PhD, assistant professor at the School of Nursing. Known for her work in rural health and championing the rights of migrant farmworker women, Rodriguez saw the opportunity to pull her students’ experiences into the context of social justice issues.

At the beginning of the semester, Rodriguez threw down the gauntlet: Any student who would be willing to orchestrate the Hunger Banquet would receive extra credit in the class. Many class members volunteered to participate, and Bethany Welnak and Jessica Luckason stepped forward to lead the effort.

“It seemed that about half of our class signed up to help with the activity, but we were leaderless. I thought it a good idea to form different groups. So we had people sign up to be on the planning/program, food, and decorating committees, says Welnak.

The banquet

On Thanksgiving eve, approximately 45 nursing students gathered in the HSLC to partake in the banquet. While sobering statistics on poverty and hunger lined the walls of the banquet room to set the tone, each participant was randomly “color-coded,” and placed in one of three economic classes: high, middle and low. Participants dined according to what each group’s income theoretically could afford. The upper-income group was served on tablecloths with silverware and balloons and feasted on fruit platters and a variety of bagels with flavored cream cheese and candy canes. The middle class received juice, plain bagels and cream cheese served less festively. Cheerios was served to the low-income group.

“The rules for the low and middle classes,” says Welnak, “were to share food and to ask for food from any class above them. The upper class was not to talk to the other classes or share food.”

The activity served as the impetus for participants to face and grapple with the inequalities based on income and indignities of being poor. As was expected, some left the banquet sated, others experiencing twinges of hunger, but all left well aware of the inhumanity of poverty.

Two speakers anchor event

Welnak and Luckason arranged for two speakers to anchor the activity. Paul Ash, director of the meal program at St. Paul’s University Catholic Center, assists Madison’s local populations who suffer from poverty. He explained the reasons for people using the program—cannot afford both food and rent, cannot hold a job, are struck by situational poverty, such as fire destroying a dwelling—but emphasized the need to eliminate the lack of dignity felt by many needing help.

Wendy Damm, clinical assistant professor at the School of Nursing, spoke of her experiences in Haiti, where she had volunteered on 10 medical missions in the last six years. The worst condition, she noted, was not having clean water. Damm’s primary message was to increase awareness of the many kinds of poverty and hunger that exist world-wide.

Desired outcomes

The purpose of staging the Hunger Banquet, says Luckason, was to emphasize that personal choices made every day influence the distribution of resources to others.

“Poverty and hunger are not only a problem in other countries, it is very prevalent throughout America—in our own communities and neighborhoods,” she notes.

Welaka adds, “We hope to make people (our classmates) understand hunger, what it is, how we play a part in it and how we can make a difference as nurses.”