Empty Bowls
Sale aids YWCA food program
They chose to sell their empty clay bowls in order to fill others’.
Potter Kären Hjort-Jensen hurriedly wrapped a clay bowl in newspaper and handed it to one of the many shoppers fawning over the handmade creations at Princess Gardens Retirement Home on Friday. Most of her own bowls had already sold. She gingerly lifted the last one, a smooth, shallow bowl made with swirls of soft green and rose.
She hoped it would sell soon. Another bowl sold meant another family would receive a box of food from the YWCA’s JustFood program. Empty Bowls, a yearly clay bowl-sale organized by the Kawartha Potters Guild and the YWCA, raised $3,000 last year. There were 135 bowls for sale Friday, and they went fast. Around 100 shoppers showed up — one of the busiest years yet for the program.
One bowl takes Hjort-Jensen about 10 days to make, she explained. It’s a long process: throwing the bowl, waiting until it hardens, trimming the top, putting it in the kiln, waxing and glazing — all very precise work. That’s what she likes about it. “I found that if I wasn’t feeling centered, I couldn’t possibly centre the clay,” she said.
The clay requires patience, and calm — a far cry from what her day job used to entail.
Now the chairwoman of the Kawartha Potters Guild, Hjort-Jensen used to be director of housing for the YWCA. Each day brought a new crisis that she had to deal with. She began pottery as a way to find peace.
“It was a real antidote to the crises I dealt with at work,” she explained. “It’s a fairly predictable process, pottery.”
It was Hjort-Jensen’s idea to start the Empty Bowls event eight years ago to help raise money for the YWCA’s food-box program.
“I thought it would be very appropriate with the work I was already doing,” she explained. “I thought my two passions could come together, and it seems like a perfect fit.”
The YWCA’s JustFood program benefits around 15,000 lowincome families each year. It provides them with a box of locally-grown and nutritious food at a subsidized price, as well as a pamphlet of recipes and infor- mation on healthy-eating.
The number of people requiring such help has steadily increased over the years, says the YMCA’s resource development director Cheryl Denomy.
“Such food programs used to only be used for emergency response,” she said. “But it’s not just needed in emergencies anymore. It’s an ongoing crisis. There are too many people who must choose between buying food or paying rent.”
On Friday, each bowl cost $25. The price included lunch. There were several bowls fashioned by “celebrity potters”, including an Olive Green Leaf Bowl by Mayor Daryl Bennett and a Conservative Blue bowl by Peterborough MP Dean Del Mastro.
“It was nice to see how happy people were picking out the bowls,” said YWCA community development coordinator Joëlle Favreau. She supervises the JustFood program and was recently recognized for her work by YWCA Canada.
“A lot of the time, when someone receives a food box, they say ‘It’s just like Christmas,’” she said. “I hope this will help make enough money to give many people that happiness.”