The Hunger Action Group, a campus group that retrieves food from Walker Memorial, Lobdell and Baker cafeterias and donates it to the CASPAR shelter, is seeking additional drivers to begin a new route between Next House and the Albany Street shelter.
Student, faculty or staff volunteers would use their own transportation to make the deliveries Monday through Thursday at 7:30pm. Volunteers would be asked to take on a regular shift that would take about 15-20 minutes each week, according to group co-president Millie Roy, a junior in biology who's been involved with the group since her freshman year.
"Hunger is a pretty important issue in this area. When I walk through Boston, I see a lot of homeless people who can't get enough food to eat. I think there should be a way to help them out," Ms. Roy said.
The group also prepares lunch every fifth Saturday at the Church of All Nations homeless shelter near Chinatown. Volunteers meet in Lobby 7 at 9:20am and arrive at the shelter about 10am, where they cook and serve food until 2pm.
"There's a piano there," said Ms. Roy. "One day this guy got up and started playing 'Lean on Me' and a lot of people just started singing along and clapping. A lot of us joined in, too. It was really sweet; I'd never seen anything like that except in a movie."
She added that there's not usually much interaction between servers and diners. "It's a little intimidating. Sometimes they don't like the food or they say something like 'Get me some real coffee.' So you may not want to talk much, but you can just be there and acknowledge their condition."
The group recently co-sponsored the Hunger Banquet with the Lutheran Ministry, and held a one-week program for students to donate money from their dining cards to Oxfam America.
Anyone interested in learning more or volunteering should contact the group via hunger-request@mit.edu.
A version of this article appeared in MIT Tech Talk on November 25, 1998.
