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MSU-Billings Hosting Hunger Banquet For Lesson on Poverty

Montana State University-Billingsis inviting their students and the public to learn more about what it’s like to be hungry.  

It is a Hunger Banquet.  It is a component of the campus’ “Power of One” activities, part of Martin Luther King Jr. service week.

Hannah Baley, Petro Hall Director, is the organizer.

“This is a unique event in that it is more interactive educational type of event where students are coming together and actively eating and learning about inequality worldwide. It is something  we hadn’t done yet," said Baley.

The format and how-to instructions come from Oxfam America, an organization with a focus on alleviating poverty. People at the banquet will be assigned a role of someone from around the world and try to understand how that person sees and experiences hunger. They could be wealthy and from the US or Russia, middle class from Thailand, or poor and from Somalia.

Baley says those coming to the event do not know exactly what they are getting into.

“Be uncomfortable with what you see and kind of explore those feelings,” Baley said. “Often times that’s when we are more inspired to act is when we feel it in our hearts. And I think this is just one of those times when we let it fill us up and then we have a call to action.”  

The Hunger Banquet is Thursday, January 19, 2017, at 5:00 pm in the upper Galleria Area of the Student Union at MSU-Billings campus.

Baley says community members interested in the event can just show up at the Student Union at 5:00 p.m. 

Kay Erickson has been working in broadcasting in Billings for more than 20 years. She spent well over a decade as news assignment editor at KTVQ-TV before joining the staff at YPR. She is a graduate of Northern Illinois University, with a degree in broadcast journalism. Shortly after graduation she worked in Great Falls where she was one of the first female sports anchor and reporter in Montana.