Unique Partnership at Edgewood College Earns Civic Engagement Award

Madison, Wis. (April 5, 2019) – The Healthy Food for All partnership at Edgewood College has received the Esther Letven Campus-Community Partnership Award at the annual Campus Compact for Wisconsin (CCWI) Civic Engagement Institute, held March 21, 2019.

The award recognizes outstanding community partnerships in Wisconsin, and recipients are selected by a committee of community partners. The award honors Esther Letven, a former UW-Parkside employee who helped to build infrastructure to support and promote community engagement there. Letven is also a founding member of CCWI.

“It is exciting to honor strong community-university partnerships this year, including the Healthy Food for All partnership with Edgewood College,” Trina Van Schyndel, Director of CCWI, said. “Strong partnerships like these support the public purposes of higher education by promoting student learning and development as both citizens and professionals.”

The Healthy Food for All partnership is part of a capstone course within the School of Business at Edgewood College. Each semester, teams of students work with a community partner that has identified some need for business-related skills. Since 2017, students have worked with Healthy Food for All and Four Lakes Processing Collective, both of which have relationships with FEED Kitchens, to address hunger and food waste in the Madison area.

Through this partnership, students have helped develop business and marketing plans for Healthy Food for All and Four Lakes Processing Collective, while gaining valuable, real world experience in the process. Students help with initiatives to address hunger, prevent food waste, and create economic opportunity to combat marginalization.

“The students...provided suggestions we could use immediately to create our brand and market our product,” Joe Mingle, Volunteer Coordinator at FEED Kitchens, said. “We could never have made such leaps forward without their skills, knowledge, commitment, and the guidance they get from their faculty.”
(Photo: Holly Klawitter, MBA Programs Coordinator and Senior Lecturer in the School of Business, accepts the award, Alverno College, March 21, 2019. Behind Klawitter is Joe Mingle, Volunteer Coordinator at FEED Kitchens. For more on this partnership, please see the story in the Winter 2019 Edgewood College Magazine.)

About Campus Compact
Campus Compact is a national coalition of more than 1,000 colleges and universities committed to the public purposes of higher education. We build democracy through civic education and community development. Our national office is in Boston, Mass., with state and regional Campus Compacts providing place-based support for member institutions located throughout the country. Campus Compact for Wisconsin (CCWI) was established in 2002 and comprises 27 members including public, private, and technical college campuses. CCWI is currently based at Cardinal Stritch University in Milwaukee, Wis.
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