Kenan-Flagler students organize mass donations for Durham homeless shelter

Second-year MBA students from UNC’s Kenan-Flagler Business School, Marco Sommerville, Wen Lin and Joseph Hiatt, organized a mass donation of food from Chapel Hill restaurants to the Durham Rescue Mission, Durham’s largest long-term homeless shelter.

The students were assigned the task of planning and implementing a social impact project as a part of their Leadership Immersion capstone course in the Kenan-Flagler Business School. Lin said the goal of the project was to use the lessons from the MBA program to help the community.

“We wanted to build partnerships — build collaboration within the community, within the business school and with a cause that we felt was very worthwhile, but also do it in a way that was very MBA-centric,” Lin said.

The meals, which were donated by Italian Pizzeria III, Brenz Pizza Co., Amante Gourmet Pizza and Mediterranean Deli, were collected from the restaurants by a group of volunteers and taken to the Durham Rescue Mission to be served as dinner for their 250 residents on Tuesday.

Hiatt said the restaurants they contacted were all willing to help out in their own way.

“They love being a part of this community, obviously we keep them alive as well, but they were excited at the chance to give back,” he said.

Zach Mcghee, general manager of Brenz Pizza Co., said the restaurant is always willing to contribute to a good cause.

“As a local business, your rapport with the community reflects on, you know, your business and stuff like that, so building those bonds with the people throughout the community definitely helps us stay in business,” he said.

Sommerville said the group originally wanted to focus on helping homeless people in Chapel Hill but found out there was a much bigger need in neighboring Durham.

“As we were doing our research on food insecurity and homelessness, we found that there (are) only a few homeless people in Chapel Hill, but there (are) so many more, maybe ten or eleven thousand more, homeless people in Durham,” he said.

Zachary Hair, an assistant volunteer coordinator at the Durham Rescue Mission, said restaurant donation events like this one help to boost the morale of the residents.

“It’s like when you’re a kid and you grow up and you know mom’s like ‘You can make a hamburger at home but you want to go to the McDonald’s’ type deal — I think that’s a valuable part of it,” he said. “I know the men are excited, like it’s already a thing going on today.”

Hiatt said the students hope this project expands beyond a single event and becomes a tradition for students at the Kenan-Flagler Business School.

“We want to leave anyone that really wants to carry the torch on, with a package, you know a plan, say if you follow these steps here’s all the contacts, here’s everything you got to do, you know it’s a really simple, easy-to-execute service project,” he said.

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