OGDEN — This weekend, residents can pick up some handmade artwork and help tackle food insecurity among college students at the same time.

The second Weber State University Empty Bowls event will be held Saturday at the Eccles Community Art Center, 2580 Jefferson Ave., from 4-7 p.m. Proceeds will go to support the Weber Cares Food Pantry.

According to Monica Linford, WSU College of Science academic advisor and instructor, Empty Bowls events are a worldwide initiative.

“Empty Bowls is an international event,” she said. “Potters all over the world conduct these events to benefit food-based charities. I participated in one several years ago in Salt Lake and I just thought it was really cool.”

Linford’s experience eventually translated into her classroom.

“I’ve been working as a potter for over 30 years and I’m teaching a class through the honors program at Weber State University that is an interdisciplinary class of writing and hand-built pottery projects,” she said. “I thought that it would be cool to have an Empty Bowls event in conjunction with my course, so I made it part of my students’ requirement to have an Empty Bowls event.”

This Saturday’s Empty Bowls event marks Linford’s second year in a row organizing the event at Weber State, though she said WSU had one eight years ago.

“There’s a grant from the Alan and Jeanne Hall Endowment for Community Engagement that covers the cost of the Empty Bowls event,” Linford said. “The event offers for sale handmade pottery bowls and has a soup kitchen theme that’s typical of all Empty Bowls events. We have donated food from some very nice restaurants like Table 25, Tona, Craft Burger, La Ferrovia, Rooster’s and Javier’s. The people who buy a ticket are able to have a meal at the Eccles Art Center … and they can select a bowl from the different tables that will be filled with bowls.”

There will also be drawings for prizes during the event.

This year’s Empty Bowls event, however, also coincides with WSU’s homecoming football game.

Linford said there will be another special option to go along with this occasion.

“When we discovered that we were double-booked with homecoming, we were thinking of, ‘How can people do both?'” she said. “We’re offering a ‘Football Fan Fast Track’ where people can go online, but their ticket and then they can order their food up front. We’ll have their food packaged for them, so all they’ll need to do is come to the event right when it opens at 4, they can pick up their bowls, drop their ticket off in whatever prize they’re interested in and head on over to the game.”

She said the money raised by Saturday’s Empty Bowls event will go a long way to help tackle a problem close to home.

“The main driving concern for me is food insecurity in college students,” she said. “I’m an academic advisor for the College of Science and as I’ve gone to different advising conferences across the nation, I’ve learned about food insecurity on college campuses.

“About one-third of students nationwide report experiencing food insecurity during their college experience. Weber State is a little higher than that — a little bit over 30% — so there are a lot of students on our campus that are experiencing food insecurity. Being able to support them with a food pantry, I think, is so foundational to helping students succeed in college just to take a little bit of that worry away from them.”

For more information and for ticket options, visit https://ogden4arts.org/events/empty-bowls-event.html.

Editor’s note: This story has been updated to correct the title of Monica Linford and the name of one the restaurants helping with the initiative, Tona.

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