If you cook it, they will come. Just ask Harrison and Becky Glotman.
The brother and sister have turned their simple Sunday dinner get-togethers with friends into a major windfall for the London Food Bank.
What started out last year as a gathering among the Glotmans and their fellow Vancouverites as a way to share food and conversation, ‘Sunday Funday’ has blossomed into dozens of students making a change in their community.
“I figured cafeteria food probably sucked, and I wasn’t eating that well either. So I told Becky, ‘Let’s have a dinner and you can invite your friends and I’ll have people over,’” says Harrison, a fourth-year Richard Ivey School of Business student. “It ended up being more than we expected. More people just came and all I made was this little lasagna, but somehow we fed everyone.”
The two didn’t want the fun to stop, and suggested it become a weekly event. The crowds kept getting bigger and bigger, and people were bringing more and more food.
“It was so much fun,” says Becky, a second-year health sciences student. “We started sitting around the couch eating and talking and it turned into this four-hour dinner. It was great.”
With the leftovers beginning to build up each week, conversation turned to what to with it all. Becky, who was volunteering at Ark Aid Mission in London at the time, was curious as to how to make the gathering more charitable.
“We saw so many homeless individuals and we thought people aren’t aware there is such a need in London,” she says. Attempts during a cold winter night to bring the leftovers to the homeless on the streets fell flat when they couldn’t locate anyone.
But they still felt there was some way to give back.
Over the next few Sunday Funday gatherings, the idea was born to collect non-perishable food items as a sort of ‘admission’ to the dinner. In that first month, more than 350 pounds of food was collected.
“We weren’t expecting that much; those boxes were heavy,” Harrison laughs. “But it was a great heavy.”
Continuing the gatherings throughout the school year, the pair returned home over the summer, but still planned for their return in September. They designed a website, formed an executive committee and grew the number group to more than 40.
“It was such a motivation to get it going again when we got back. It’s so exciting,” Becky says. “Once you realize how much power this has, you can’t just give up on this idea. We’ve invested so much time into this; you can’t stop a tradition.”
And stop it hasn’t. Since school started this year, more than 1,000 pounds of food have been collected and will be delivered to the London Food Bank.
“It started out as fun and quickly turned into this,” Harrison says. “There is a natural inclination for university students to get involved and they are so passionate once they do. There are so many people involved with this that make it work and have made it such a success. There is no way the two of us could do it alone.”
The two hope to get club status – even charity status – for the Sunday Funday phenomena, in hopes of spreading the idea to other universities.