Students, faculty and staff helped raise $2,150 for AACC’s Helplink at an Empty Bowls fundraiser on Nov. 6.

Service-learning students from the Hotel,Culinary Arts and Tourism Institute and the Sarbanes Center for Career and Civic Engagement, collaborated to serve $10 soups in the SUN dining hall along with student-made ceramic bowls, handmade rolls and spring water.

“Empty bowls, obviously, is significant, because so many people at the end of the day have nothing to eat,” said the event’s organizer, professor Randy Stahl, a chef who has participated in the fundraiser for more than a decade.

The money raised goes to AACC’s Helplink, which gives grants to students who need short-term financial assistance to pay for housing, food, transportation, textbooks, health and child care.

The hospitality class that usually hosts the event did not run this fall semester, so culinary student volunteers and staff took it upon themselves to make sure the fundraiser still went on, Stahl said.

“It’s something that is important to the community here, so we try to keep it going,” Stahl said.

A culinary student who volunteered agreed.

“This is my first Empty Bowls event,” Shayla Fleming, a third-year hospitality student, said. “I helped do a lot of prep for this, so I get to see my hard work [pay off] and see how much people like the soup.”

The menu for Thursday’s fundraiser included three soups: winter root vegetable, sweet potato, maple curried apple bisque; roasted tomato seafood chowder florentine soup; and Tex-Mex smoked beef chili.

Students said the fundraiser was for a good cause.

“Charitable donations come from this,” said Guy Nolet, a third-year culinary student who also attended last year’s event. “Especially for people that don’t have enough money to be the most successful here [At AACC]. So I can contribute to that and get some soup out of it.”