Kathy Pompili didn’t let her muse stray too far out on a limb Thursday morning at the WOW! Factory.
“I like it,” she said, swirling her paintbrush around the contours of an empty bowl.
“Blue and gold. WVU colors. Can’t go wrong with that.”
Mike Taylor paints a bowl at the WOW! Factory for Empty Bowls.
Pompili normally lends her talents to the volunteer auxiliary of Mon Health Medical Center.
That’s where she’s famous for her “Trees to Go” Christmas fundraiser at the hospital on J.D. Anderson Drive.
Money raised over the years has bought diagnostic equipment and whole new clinics, even.
At the WOW! Factory, she and her fellow auxiliary members were prescribing altruism for a different cause.
They were painting the soup bowls that will be used next month for the Empty Bowls Monongalia luncheon at Mylan Park.
That event will be from 11 a.m.-2:30 p.m. Feb. 29, at Mylan Park.
Empty Bowls Monongalia is the organization that works to combat food insecurity across Morgantown and Mon County.
According to numbers culled by the online watchdog group Feeding America, 1 in 5 children in the Mountain State are food insecure — which means, nutritionally speaking, they simply don’t get enough to eat during the day.
That even carries over to relatively prosperous Morgantown and Monongalia County.
Food pantries and backpack nutrition programs here hum along briskly in their attempts to knock the growl of an empty belly.
More than 2,600 Mon County children were defined as food insecure in 2017, Empty Bowls said.
And more than 4,600 children in Mon County Schools qualified for free or reduced-priced lunches that same year.
Visit ebmon.org to find out more.
In the meantime, Empty Bowls Monongalia is an organization that blends altruism and art.
Well, that, plus a whole bunch of soup.
Here’s how it works: Volunteer potters throw the bowls, which are then painted by other volunteers.
The bowls are a canvas, where anything goes.
Jackson Pollock explosions of Impressionism. Mini-Van Gogh tributes.
“Hey, it’s your bowl,” said Monica Edwards, a WOW! Factory manager.
At the annual Empty Bowls fundraiser, those vessels are ladled full with soup fare from the traditional chicken noodle — to lemongrass-tofu.
You can even take the bowl home to remind you of the mission.
Maybe you’ll get that Kathy Pompili original, its artist said, smiling.
TWEET @DominionPostWV
