Empty Bowls Project: A souper event at Riverhead High School, Feb. 2

Students and staff at Riverhead High School are cooking up a great project. You might even call it a souper project.

Students in ceramics classes, the cooking club and the photography club are collaborating on an event which brings all of their talents together in a fundraiser to benefit the Phillips Avenue School food pantry.

Ceramics students are making bowls as part of their art curriculum and the students in the cooking club are going to fill them with soup they’ve made. On Feb. 2, from 6 to 8 p.m. community members are invited to share in their hard work by purchasing a bowl, filling it with soup, and enjoying the student work in the photography exhibit.

The project is part of a larger program known as the Empty Bowls Project, a non-profit grassroots effort begun in 1990 in a Michigan high school ceramics classroom that aims to combat hunger in local communities. When teachers Selena Pagliarulo and Roberta MacGray heard about the project at the end of the school year last year, they knew it was a project they needed to get their students involved in.

Pagliarulo, who teaches high school ceramics, said the students are so excited about the project that they have volunteered to give up their free time to make more bowls. So far the 38 students have made about 70 bowls. They started out in the beginning of the year, according to Pagliarulo, using simple techniques like slab made bowls and have worked their way up into throwing them on pottery wheels. Most students have made at least two bowls — one for themselves and

one to donate. The donated bowls are different sizes and colors, but they’re all made with the hope that they’ll go home with a buyer that night. Pagliarulo said there will be a table filled with $5 bowls and one of $10 bowls.

“I’m excited to see where this thing goes,” she said referring to this year’s event. She’d like to see it expand in the future to involve the community in making some of the bowls — maybe kind of a “Community Bowl-a-Thon” she said.

Pagliarulo has taught at Riverhead for 11 years and is excited about the future of the ceramics program there. She said there’s always been a consistently strong turnout for the introductory ceramics class, but now it looks like there are going to be enough students to be able to offer a more advanced ceramics class.

The students in the cooking club are planning to make a variety of soups including minestrone, corn chowder, broccoli cheddar and loaded baked potato soup using potatoes donated by a staff member.

“My cooking club is very big into community projects,” MacGray said.  “We have  a pancake breakfast in December where all proceeds go to buying presents for children in our community and we feed the homeless at Our Redeemer Lutheran Church for Maureen’s Haven two times each school year,” she said. 

The event takes place in the Riverhead High School cafeteria from 6 to 8 p.m. on Feb. 2.