Brattleboro Area Drop In Center

A Place of Welcome, Warmth, and Peace

Empty Bowls Eighth Annual Benefit Dinner

This year’s Empty Bowls dinner, a benefit for the Brattleboro Area Drop in Center, will take place on Sunday, October 9, 2011, with two seatings at 5:00 and 6:30 pm in the dining hall at Landmark College in Putney. For a $25.00 donation, guests will be served a simple, nutritious meal of soup, bread, cheese, apples, beverage, and dessert, and will enjoy live music. Afterwards the guests are invited to keep the bowl from which they eat as a reminder that while their bellies may be full, there are many who go hungry each day throughout our county.

Each summer, and into the fall, ceramic studios in the Brattleboro Area are humming with activity. Potters and ceramic artists, both amateur and professional, can be found making bowls - this year 1,000 bowls, all to be donated to the Empty Bowls dinner.

Empty Bowls is an annual, worldwide event that raises hunger awareness as well as funds to fight hunger. In Brattleboro, the dinner is sponsored by Brattleboro Clayworks (a potters’ cooperative and ceramics resource center) and Landmark College, which hosts the dinner. All proceeds are donated to the Brattleboro Area Drop-In Center, a day and in the winter an overnight shelter providing an emergency food shelf as well as other support services.

Though Empty Bowls is part of an international effort to fight hunger, the grass roots nature of the event is very much in evidence. Each Empty Bowls dinner is organized at the local level through a collaboration of potters, educators, volunteers, hunger activists, and the local business community.

The dramatic rise in food prices in recent months has meant that the Brattleboro Area Drop In Center has seen a tremendous increase in requests for food and other services. Over 7,100 individuals rely on the drop-in center, and of these, many are working poor–people who are fully employed, but whose wages do not cover their basic living expenses. Skyrocketing fuel prices have only increased these numbers. Half of all the people who are served by the Drop In Center are children and senior citizens. The Brattleboro Area Drop-In Center also operates an overflow shelter in the winter at the First Baptist Church, in conjunction with Morningside Shelter.

How can you help? Your support of the BADIC and/or attendance at the eighth annual Empty Bowls Dinner will make a difference to the hungry in our community. Tickets are $25. For reservations, please call (802) 257-2005, extension 108, or (800) 852-4286, extension 108. Tickets are also on sale at the Shoe Tree, and Everyone’s Books in Brattleboro and at Penelope Wurr at the Tavern in Putney.