FOCUS IN

Tony Alter, Empty Bowls–Peninsula, 2014. flic.kr/p/mi4vzD. CC BY 2.0. creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/.

Elyse Rowe

Empty Bowls started in the early 1990s when Lisa Blackburn and John Hartom took action to counteract the negative news around hunger and food scarcity in their area. Hartom, a high-school ceramics teacher, challenged his students to throw 120 bowls. These bowls were sold at our first Empty Bowls luncheon, bringing in $5 each in funds that were used to fight hunger. The event was a success; immediately, people began duplicating it all over the country and, eventually, all over the world. Hartom has since passed, but the community continues to grow with his vision of helping to resolve food scarcity on a global level, one community at a time.  

Empty Bowls is an international project to fight hunger, personalized by artists and art organizations on a community level. The project was originally managed by the Imagine/RENDER Group, a 501(c)(3) organization. Each community’s events are independent. The project expands one group of artists and students at a time, and events take place in many areas in the United States and Canada, often in conjunction with the United Nations–sponsored World Food Day. Empty Bowls now supports food-related charities around the world.

When I realized that Kansas City didn’t have an Empty Bowls event, I researched how to organize and start one. I contacted Hartom via the Empty Bowls website to register an event. 

The next challenge was to bring the community of potters together and create bowls. The location for the event was at ArtsTech, run by my friend Dave Sullivan. He volunteered the space and set the event date.

We can all be agents of change in the communities where we live, thus making an impact on the world together.

First, we organized a team of potters, and clay was donated by Bracker’s Good Earth Clays in Lawrence. We had a bowl-making party at Belger Crane Yard Studios with students from the college. Bowls were donated from other potters around Kansas City and from local schools. By the date of the event, we had more than 1,000 bowls. Soup, food, and drinks were donated from local restaurants. We set up local event notice on social media and sent out public notices to the local TV news, radio, and newspapers. Tickets were $25 at the door. There was a huge line thanks to the community coming out and caring; Kansas City has a heart of gold.

The Kansas City Empty Bowls event raised funds for Harvesters Food Network over a four-year period. We contributed to Harvesters to help them reach their goal to feed the Kansas City community by providing more than one million meals a year.   

We are always looking for schools and communities of potters to share the vision—to see themselves making a contribution to a global cause on a local level. When people come to the event and see a bowl is stamped “EB” (Empty Bowls) they ask, “Who is EB?”

We are all EB. The objective as originally stated by John and Lisa still holds true. We can all be agents of change in the communities where we live, thus making an impact on the world together. I want to create a button that says “I am EB” to help give students a more personal connection with the event. If you are interested in starting or supporting an Empty Bowls event, please visit emptybowls.com. 

LeRoy Grubbs is the host of the EmptyBowls.com website. leroy@emptybowls.com