Walsh corporate communication students are collaborating with nearby StarkFresh during their spring semester to help raise awareness about hunger issues in their local community.
The group of students led by Professor Lee Horrisberger created small teams to allocate different aspects of this campaign, including video work, visual representations, marketing objectives and program outreach to give the community a sense of togetherness. The goal of the class is to use each student’s talent for different elements of the project.
The students were also able to tour the StarkFresh campus, located at 321 Cherry Street N.E. in Canton, to see the new grocery store, the veggie mobiles, the community kitchen, the dining room, and down to the basement to see mushrooms being grown.
“This opportunity will not only benefit StarkFresh but will help us students to prepare for the work world,” said graduating senior Kyle Burke. “It has given us the chance to work with each other and for an organization.”
As an outreach of its mission to develop leaders in service to others, every Walsh student is required to complete a service-learning project during their academic career. The Office of Service-Learning furthers this commitment by connecting Walsh University students to the local community.
“StarkFresh has been a valuable partner to Walsh for many years and we look to them to help us better understand the issues of food insecurity and systemic poverty in our community,” said Michael Cinson, Director of Global Learning and Service Learning. “We work to achieve reciprocity with our community partners and courses. Projects with StarkFresh are a great example of a mutual benefit. StarkFresh provides our Walsh students a hands-on, practical landscape and Walsh’s students are able to provide a product to further advocate and promote their mission.”
StarkFresh has been working with Walsh University in various capacities since 2013. Service-learning projects has given this non-profit, with limited resources, access to professional-level project work.
“Partnering with Walsh University has been crucial to helping us continue to create relevant marketing content,” said Tom Phillips, Executive Director at StarkFresh. “Over the years we have found that for the students, being able to take their classroom knowledge and apply it to a real-world application and be able to help out a community agency while doing so has proven to be beneficial to all involved. “
The students have been receiving media attention for their work as well. Click here to listen to an interview with Walsh senior corporate communication majors Stone Kaufman and Cobe Hutchison who spoke with WHBC 1480 Joe Bozeka on Tuesday, April 13.
The Bargain Hunter also spotlighted the collaboration in this article on April 14, 2021
About StarkFresh: Tackling the causes of hunger by creating realistic pathways out of poverty. We envision a Stark County where a culture of good nutrition creates a better quality of life as well as a community that is rejuvenated and empowered, free from the restraints of systematic poverty. https://starkfresh.org/