United Food Bank and Services of Plant City Annual Report FY18 (Pages)

Reminder of Empty Bowls
2011 was the inaugural year for the United Food
Bank’s Empty Bowls Project, which took place on
November 12, at the Robert W. Willaford Railroad
Museum in Plant City. What started out as a combined
art and lunch project to bring public awareness to the
issues of local hunger in East Hillsborough, has grown
to 800 to 1,000 ticket sales per year.
Empty Bowls was originally started in 1990 as a
grassroots movement in Michigan by Lisa Blackburn
and art teacher, John Hartom. It is often held in
conjunction with the United Nations sponsored World
Food Day in participating communities across the
nation and in Canada. Event guests choose a bowl and
keep it as a reminder of all of the empty bowls in the
world. It was Hartom’s idea to give artists and local art
students a way to personally make a difference in their
community.
The Empty Bowls Project in Plant City—to bring
awareness to food insecurity throughout the entire
United Food Bank service area of Plant City, Dover,
Seffner, Valrico, Thonotosassa, and Lithia—is
coordinated annually by the committee chairman and
United Food Bank Board Member, Silvia Dodson, and
her entire committee.
Since its start in East Hillsborough, and with the help
of a grant from the Arts Council in Plant City, the food
bank engaged David Dye, a retired pottery artist from
the Hillsborough Community College Ybor Campus, to
become a Pottery Artist guest instructor in the schools.
Mr. Dye demonstrates the art form in at least nine
Hillsborough County Area 5 elementary and middle
schools. Following a demonstration, students are
encouraged to then create and donate their pottery for
the Empty Bowls event.
While it is the second leading fundraising event, next
to Celebrity Chef, for the United Food Bank each year,
it is so much more. It’s a means to advocate for hunger
relief in our own back yard using an intergenerational,
visual arts, community-based approach.
In 2013, the United Food Bank and its Empty Bowls
Project Committee welcomed 13 participating churches
and organizations with the presentation of 20 different
soups donated for the event. Last year the number of
participating organizations rose to 30 with 34 varieties
of donated soup. Additionally, in 2017, 26 schools
participated in making clay bowls that the public took
home from the Empty Bowls event as a reminder of the
many bowls that go unfilled each day.
The Empty Bowls art-for-hunger event is taking place
from 10:30 a.m. to 2:00 p.m. on November 10, 2018, at
the Railroad Museum in Plant City. The popularity of
the event and the local soup recipes inspired an Empty
Bowls cookbook to go on sale in November 2018.
The tenth annual United Food Bank Celebrity Chef fundraiser that took
place on February 3, 2018, was a great success with nearly 50 silent and
live auction items, including a dinner for six at nationally renowned Chef
Fabio Viviani’s new Osteria restaurant in downtown Tampa, opening in early
October 2018. Chef Viviani gave a live cooking demonstration in front of
more than 300 Celebrity Chef event attendees at The John Trinkle Center
in Plant City. This is the second appearance by Chef Viviano, well known
for his debut on Bravo’s Top Chef. Other celebrities have included the Lee
Brothers and Emily Ellyn.
A date of February 2, 2019, is reserved for the next Celebrity Chef event
held on behalf of the United Food Bank and Services of Plant City.