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Voices of Hunger: Come listen to stories of hunger in Lafayette/West Lafayette

Voices of Hunger: Thursday, May 5, 2011, 1 p.m. to 3 p.m.; Patty & Rusty Rueff Galleries, PAO Hall

Dear friends and colleagues,

You have followed our blog postings drawing on the reflections from the "Hunger Project" over the last few months.Finally, it is time to voice these stories that have been weaved together collaboratively by community members in West Lafayette/Lafayette who experience hunger in the current political and economic landscape. The stories will not only draw you to the everydayness of hunger amidst which communities at the margins negotiate their lives, but will also offer you insights into the tremendous courage and conviction with which community members negotiate their lived experiences in the midst of absence of fundamental resources.

The purpose of the project titled “Voices of Hunger in Tippecanoe County,” is to develop a collaborative partnership between Purdue University, Food Finders, and its clients to listen to the voices of hunger in Lafayette/West Lafayette, and to develop solutions addressing food insecurity in Indiana. The partnership with local community members who experience hunger seeks to create channels to identify problems related to food insecurity, and the corresponding solutions from within the local communities of the food insecure in Tippecanoe county that are developed through the participation of the food insecure in culturally centered processes of change.

Through in-depth interviews and PhotoVoice projects conducted in partnership with the food insecure in the area, the goal of our collaborative partnership is to draw attention to the problems of food insecurity in the Lafayette/West Lafayette area. At the event, we will listen to the stories of hunger, brainstorm about strategies, and consider the ways in which the partnership between the food insecure, Food Finders, Purdue and the broader West Lafayette/Lafayette community can work toward addressing the challenge of hunger experienced in our community.

The project is supported by the College of Liberal Arts (CLA)"Home" Community Building Program. Programs such as "Home" creatively and innovatively support engaged scholarship that seeks to make a difference in our communities. Also, special thanks to my colleague JoAnn Miller for supporting this project through the "Home" program, to the College of Liberal Arts for its leadership vision of engaged scholarship, to Professor Harry Bulow of Visual and Performing Arts for so generously sharing the gallery space, to the graduate students in the class (Abigail, Agaptus, Christina, Haijuan, and Sirisha) who have worked tirelessly on the project (spending many hours in the field above and beyond the requirements of the classroom), Katy Bunder and the staff at Food Finders, and most importantly, to our many participants in the "Hunger Project" who so generously shared their time, efforts, and stories with the goal of making a difference in the lived experiences of community members who experience hunger. Your generosity of spirit is a reminder of the tremendous potential of the margins in de-centering the structures that marginalize.

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