Hoping to stimulate thought while helping out charity, Dean Jen Smith is donating a can for each College of Arts & Sciences student who visits office hours during the PB&Joy food drive.

The fourth annual food drive, which runs from April 3-15, is a University-wide effort to raise awareness for hunger issues in and around the St. Louis community and to support Operation Food Search. Operation Food Search is a local organization focused on teaching the community about cooking and nutrition with the goal of ending hunger.

Smith, dean of the College of Arts & Sciences, came up with the idea to unite academic and community efforts on a whim and decided to run with it.

“It was a little bit of a random idea,” Smith said. “It just happened to be that I was talking to someone about students not going to office hours and how sad it makes faculty, and the same day I went to an introductory meeting about PB&Joy, and so it was really just the coincidence of those things happening on the same day that I just said, ‘Hey, I wonder if we can do something that can satisfy both needs.’”

As of April 13, 100 visits had been logged on the College’s “Things I Learned” page, but Smith is hoping for 400 by the end of the drive—which would account for about 10 percent of the College of Arts & Sciences. As a reward, 10 winners from the class that garners the most donations will win Bear Bucks. Currently, over half of the logged visits have come from the class of 2017.

“Freshman get more involved in almost everything. I think they’re still trying things out and figuring out what they want to be a part of, and so you have more willingness to experiment, and then people’s time is so committed once you get past that, and so you’re competing with a lot of solid interests that people have and commitments that they have,” Smith said.

In 2013, the PB&Joy drive collected 8,409 pounds of food and donated $4,741, providing enough resources to Operation Food Search to feed 3,042 people for a day.

As of April 13, 104 donors from Washington University had helped to raise $4,630 for Operation Food Search this year, but the tangible impact of canned and monetary donations will not be available until after the drive ends later this week.

Stephanie Kurtzman, director of the Community Service Office, said that while donations to the food drive are important, Operation Food Search’s educational role is also significant.

“While food pantries are wonderful and important, [Operation Food Search] makes a bigger impact. They actually service over 230 social service agencies in Missouri and Illinois, so their scope and reach is so significant; they speak to a lot of people,” Kurtzman said.

“Hunger looks different today, particularly in the aftermath of the recession. It’s much more suburban. It’s much less visible. It’s much less stereotypical, and there are people among us who have experienced hunger. So it’s not an ‘us and them’ kind of thing; it’s a ‘we might be them someday,’ and those folks that we’re talking about might be among us,” she added.

Smith plans to continue working with the food drive in the future, but this idea is more of a test run at present.

“If this turns out not to be particularly good in getting participation, then I’ll try to come up with another way,” she said. “We’re trying to accomplish a lot of goals; [one] is raising [the] Arts & Sciences social media profile. I’m mostly interested in getting people to meet with their professors…then obviously, we want to contribute to the community.”