By Lauren Kimura
In March, Cypress High School celebrated the official opening of the student-led Comfort Kitchen. This on-campus pantry, located in the media center, provides various nutritious meals that are free and accessible to all students.
Put in motion by Senior Parsmi Rajput and teacher Shelley Hawkins, this kitchen aims to “make sure that nutrition or food insecurity doesn’t get in a student’s way of being able to thrive at school,” said Rajput. With the support of the Bezos Scholars Program, a year-long leadership program for high-school students and educators, they were given the ability to launch the “Community Change Project” that became Cypress’ Comfort Kitchen.
“After spending a couple months with my educator and community members, researching what issue would be the best to tackle for our community, we realized a lot of things fell into place regarding food insecurity,” Rajput described, realizing just how important this issue was to Cypress’ community.
In a similar way, this problem was also acknowledged by Sophomore and club President Amelia Dinh, who decided to start the Pantry Project. “I noticed that none of the clubs on campus focused on food specifically, so I wanted to fill in that gap because I knew food was a struggle for many people,” Dinh said. She described the Pantry Project as a club that, “raises awareness, hosts events, and offers volunteer hours that are all related to food with the main objective of improving people’s lives and helping in any way we can.”
Dinh emphasized how important it is to bring light to this issue, encouraging students to donate and participate in their events with the greater goal of expanding this club to schools across the country. For now, they are increasing their presence at Cypress High School with a combination of social media posts and on-campus advertising as well as a partnership with Rajput and Hawkins. Together, the Pantry Project helps keep the Comfort Kitchen stocked– a collaboration built from the shared commitment of addressing food inequalities.
In addition to the support from the Pantry Project and Bezos Foundation, the Comfort Kitchen also received a second grant from the food company, Sodexo. With this additional fund, the Comfort Kitchen is expanding to not only provide packaged goods but also fresh produce. Hawkins described how they used this second grant to partner with Cypress’ Green Tech classes, run by teacher Matthew Bidwell. “His students are going to build hydroponic grow towers… so we can start growing fresh produce that kids can actually take home with them,” Hawkins stated.
Set to complete the garden before the end of the school year, the Comfort Kitchen looks to bring to Cypress a new era of change where no student goes hungry.