Empty Bowls Dinner Brings Campus Community Together
Ryleigh Johnson | Nov. 25, 2025
Attendees of the Empty Bowls event held at Warren Wilson College (WWC) in Swannanoa, N.C. on November 19, 2025. (Neko Heinrich/Echo)
November 19, 2025, marked Warren Wilson College’s (WWC) 27th annual Empty Bowls dinner, held to benefit Asheville Poverty Initiative (API). The fundraiser, which is organized by the Community Engagement Crew, works to support WWC’s community partners while also bringing together students, faculty and friends of the college for a shared meal.
API began in 2011 with a mission to, as event emcee and Community Engagement Crew member Ellery Rather shared, serve “those experiencing physical hunger, those seeking a sense of belonging and those eager to contribute.” It houses two main programs focused on addressing poverty and inequality in Asheville. The first, 12 Baskets Café, was founded in 2011 by the Rev. Shannon Spencer, current chaplain and director of spiritual life at WWC. The Café “rescues” food from grocery stores and restaurants, repurposing food that would otherwise be wasted into 400 free meals a week. The second is their Realities of Poverty program, where “Poverty Educators” who have experienced homelessness or poverty share their stories in the hopes of reducing stereotypes and providing education about inequality in Western North Carolina.
Emily Witherspoon, a WWC alumnae and one of API’s Poverty Educators, shared her story at the event.
“I spent two years homeless in Asheville during [the COVID pandemic],” Witherspoon said. “I went from being a soccer mom to sitting in the end of the food line at the Mission. I went from knowing who I was and where I was to being invisible.”
During this period, Witherspoon found 12 Baskets Café, an encounter that changed her life.
“[12 Baskets] is the only place in Asheville where you are allowed to walk in exactly how you are and just sit down and be served,” Witherspoon said. “At 12 Baskets, you sit down, and you get to choose. When I know I'm going to be full, when my neighbor sitting next to me knows they’re going to be full, conversations start, and from those conversations, community is built. What we like to say is that community can cure poverty, community can cure loneliness...Instead of the biological family, it becomes your logical family.”
Over $3,000 was raised for API through ticket sales and a raffle of goods donated from WWC campus crews, such as the Fiber Arts and Farm Crews, and local businesses like Dynamite Coffee Roasters and Malaprop’s Bookstore.
Members of WWC’s Ceramics Crew are responsible for crafting all of the bowls for the event, which attendees then took home. Lili Jones, a senior on the Ceramics Crew, expressed her delight at getting to create and share her work.
“[Making bowls] is a really meditative process of the same action yielding different results over and over again, which is cool, because you can throw a billion different shapes of bowl,” Jones said. “I've been making every single one completely different, trying to see what happens and do some experimentation. It's really nice that you don't have to keep all of the results. I'm making this for someone else to enjoy it, even if it's something I don't personally like.”
Attendees show off their bowls at Warren Wilson College’s (WWC) Empty Bowls event in Swannanoa, N.C. on Nov. 19. (Neko Heinrich/Echo)
Jenn Kaplan, the supervisor of the Ceramics Crew, considered participating in the event an honor.
“I've lived in a bunch of different states as a teacher and been part of Empty Bowls [events] in all of these places,” Kaplan said. “To carry on a tradition here is really important to me, and hearing about [Asheville Poverty Initiative's] mission today was really special.”
Warren Wilson College (WWC) band the Swannanoa Sweethearts plays at the Empty Bowls dinner on November 19, 2025 in Swannanoa, N.C. From left: Emma Taylor McCallum, Josephine Bate, Dakota Ward, Lydia Blake and August Bass.
WWC student band the Swannanoa Sweethearts provided live music for the dinner. Dakota Ward, a member of the band, shared their love of getting to experience the community that the event created.
“I just have the best time playing music and watching everyone come in and pick up all the bowls and look at them and show them to their friends, and enjoy the soup and talk to people that they don't know,” Ward said. “It's really cute.”
Fellow band member Lydia Blake echoed Ward’s sentiment.
“I just think music is the best way to bring people together,” Blake said. “Whatever community events we can come to, I think, the more the better.”
Students, faculty, crew supervisors and community members were all in attendance, with Madeline Wadley, director of community engagement, sharing that the event saw the most WWC student attendance of the nine Empty Bowls dinners she has helped host. Senior Community Engagement crew member Jasper Everingham reflected on the large student turnout and the success of the event as a whole, expressing their love for the support the community showed.
“It's an incredibly meaningful event that brings people together,” Everingham said. “Not [only people] from campus, not only students and staff and faculty, but also from the broader community, in support of an organization that is doing an incredible amount of work in the Swannanoa and Asheville area.”
Community Engagement crew member Jasper Everingham serves Emily Witherspoon, a guest speaker and Asheville Poverty Initiative Poverty Educator on November 19, 2025 in Swannanoa, N.C. (Neko Heinrich/Echo)