Empty Bowls - 2011
Oregon Potters Association coordinates an annual fund-raiser at the Safeway Waterfront Blues Festival to benefit Oregon Food Bank. OPA collects hundreds of pottery donations of all types, sizes and shapes throughout the year. OPA members then sell the donated pottery—often at bargain prices—at the Empty Bowls booth, near the main gate, at the Waterfront Blues Festival.
This years event is July 2nd – 4th at Portland’s Waterfront Park.
Over the past decade, OPA’s Empty Bowls event has raised more than $220,000 to help fight hunger in Oregon and Clark County, Wash.
The planning for this event began late last fall with a phenomenal Collaboration project held at Georgie’s last December . Over 400 pieces were collaboratively made to be sold at the Empty Bowls Event. From this event, we already raised $508 for the Oregon Food Bank and were able to deliver that check in person at the last General Meeting. We are grateful to all of the OPA members who came to throw, trim, and glaze the pots. Big thanks goes to the Georgie’s staff for providing the facilities to throw, trim, glaze and fire the pottery as well as a donation of 500 lbs of clay for the event.
Many local schools have been busy making bowls for the Empty Bowls project. Pat Brame from St. Helens High School was at it again with his students who have been busy making bowls for their senior projects and various throw-a-thons. Margaret Synan-Russel and Andrea Roselle at the Oregon Episcopal School worked with 8 classes of 18 students to make bowls as part of OES's Community service day as a memorial to those lost during the Mount Hood Climb. Mark Warners students from Parkrose Highschool made and donated over 200 bowls for the event. Greg Johnson, a new ceramics instructor at Tigard High School organized a local Empty Bowls event and will be donating the left over bowls to the OPA event. Gay Lyon with PCC’s SE Center has donated several boxes of pots left over from their newly established ceramics program. Pat, Gay and Andrea will also be doing volunteer shifts during the upcoming event. I know there are several others in our community that are doing similar things to help us accumulate the pottery needed to put on the event and raise money for the hungry in our community.
All proceeds from Empty Bowls benefit Oregon Food Bank and its work to eliminate hunger and its root causes … because no one should be hungry.
The empty bowl symbolizes hunger and poverty faced by people throughout the world. A group of Michigan potters created Empty Bowls in 1991. The program is now a fund-raising project in nearly all 50 states.
Distribution of Emergency Food throughout Oregon and Clark County, Wash., has reached record levels, according to Oregon Food Bank. In an average month, more than 210,000 people rely on food from emergency food boxes to stave off hunger in Oregon and Clark County, Wash. Of those, 36 percent are children.
Oregon Food Bank is a nonprofit, charitable organization. It is the hub of a the Oregon Food Bank Network, a statewide network of 20 regional food banks and 915 hunger-relief agencies serving Oregon and Clark County, Wash.
Read more about the Oregon Food Bank and the Waterfront Blues Festival.
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