Dozens of bowls in various shapes and colors lined the room, waiting to be picked. Liszt's "La Campanella" played faintly in the background as lumps of damp clay whirled on a pottery wheel. The Riverside Art Museum hosted the annual Riverside Empty Bowls event on Sunday, Nov. 1, featuring live entertainment and drawing on student talent across several fields to support local food initiatives.
Empty Bowls is an annual community fundraiser organized by Riverside Unified School District high schools, including Martin Luther King, John W. North, Ramona, Riverside Polytechnic and Arlington. The event showcases programs across the district, such as ceramics and culinary arts, to raise money to combat food insecurity in the city.
"The idea is, 'Your bowl is empty, let's fill it,'" event co-organizer and Riverside Poly High School ceramics teacher Andrea Williams said. "As artists, we tend to be a little more selfless, and as educators, we always want to give back as well. Stuff like this is important for the community, and I want to make sure it doesn't die. Everyone else does their part, too. It's important to give back, and the kids volunteer and give their time. Educators and students both get to learn how to help and give selflessly."
Guests who donated $15 could choose a unique bowl made by ceramics students and receive a warm meal served by RUSD's Career Technical Education culinary program. All proceeds from the event will go to Overflow Farms, a local nonprofit that provides fresh produce to people in need.
"Overflow Farms' mission is to provide food to low-income families, food banks and soup kitchens," Overflow Farms President Fred Stover said. "Everything we grow is organic, and everything we grow we donate to people in need, soup kitchens, food banks, UCR and RCC."
Overflow Farms grew out of Stover's work harvesting client orchards that had been left unpicked and donating the produce to local soup kitchens and food banks. There, he noticed how limited and low quality much of the food was.
"I noticed at every soup kitchen or food bank that all they had were the staples — rice, beans, pasta and canned goods," Stover said. "If they did have veggies, they were really nasty and nobody would eat them. So we did that for three or four years. Then somebody donated a piece of land to start a garden, and we started donating that to soup kitchens and food banks. From there, we expanded into Overflow Farms."
Beyond providing food to institutions and people in need, Stover hopes to begin tackling what he sees as a root cause of food insecurity: structural unemployment.
"We would like to do vocational training for people coming out of homelessness to get them back into the routine of working," Stover said. "Expanding beyond food, the farm is just the meeting place to bring the community together."
Food insecurity fellows from College Corps at UC Riverside also helped run the event. For some, the desire to contribute comes from personal experience.
"I really like helping people, and I like learning, too," College Corps fellow Danna Valdovinos said. "I know there's a problem with food access, and I used to have food insecurity myself, so I know the struggle and stress when you don't have something to eat. I like to help make an easier way for people to access food."
The event's name carries its own message. While a bowl symbolizes nourishment and comfort, the "emptiness" in the name points to a persistent problem in the city.
"It's called Empty Bowls because people who aren't fed have empty bowls," Martin Luther King High School student Melaina Perez said. "It's important for everyone, including in Riverside, to have food because it's a basic human right, and we don't always remember that. So this can bring awareness in a fun way. It really hits toward the end when you see how much money we raised to help people. …"
Year after year, Empty Bowls brings generations of Riverside residents together to solve community problems, one bowl at a time. As Stover put it, the beauty lies in "everybody working under one umbrella to serve the community. Instead of everybody doing their own thing, we can all do it together."
