With the Wisconsin cold settling in, many UW-Madison students are cozying up indoors. However, not all students have the luxury of a home on winter nights.
Two Wisconsin Union Directorate organizations hosted Sweets for Smiles Thursday to make homemade treats for people spending the nights in local homeless shelters.
WUD Alternative Breaks Director Iffa Bhuiyan said she hoped the event would help the homeless population through the holidays.
“We wanted to make sure that everyone was able to get some sort of a treat, or just kind of getting that feeling of home and stuff by cookies,” Bhuiyan said.
WUD Alternative Breaks, an organization focused on providing service learning opportunities for UW-Madison students, worked with WUD Cuisine in order to combine their passions for service and food.
“WUD Cuisine does a lot of cooking events in general already,” said WUD Cuisine Director Federica Ranelli. “In every cooking event we do, we tie a thread of education or conversation through the entire event, so this is actually perfect for us to work together on.”
Students baked chocolate chip and peppermint blossom cookies as well as seven-layer bars for Porchlight, a local organization that works to address homelessness, and Grace Episcopal Church. Participants were also asked to bring canned goods to donate to the Porchlight Food Ppantry.
“It could be easy to feel removed from the people on State Street who are homeless—some of them are older—but when you think about it, there’s students sitting in your classrooms who are going through those struggles,” Ranelli said. “It puts it in a different context, and I think we can understand and empathize more.”
According to Bhuiyan and Ranelli, the goal of the event was to produce 900 treats to serve around 250 people because, in the words of Ranelli, “nobody eats just one cookie.”
