LOUISVILLE, Ky. — A group of students at Louisville’s Waggener High School are giving back to the city’s west end, which for years has not had the same access to fresh and healthy food as other areas in the city.
Members of the school’s Black Student Union are renovating a donated school bus into a grocery store on wheels. Once complete, it will be stocked with fresh and healthy food, baby supplies and hygiene products. Those items will be given away for free.
“It just makes me, like, full of amazement, knowing that we’ve come so far with this project and we’re actually, like, actually being able to see it in person,” Waggener junior Zamaya Lloyd said as they stepped onto the bus for the first time. “I think it’s been a good start so far. I can’t wait to see what we can do next with it.”
Lloyd is one of the several BSU students working on this project.
She says it will address issues in the west section of the city, where many people lack easy access to healthy food. Lloyd calls this “food apartheid.”
“A food desert is something that just randomly happens and is like just in the area, but a food apartheid is something that is caused for a reason toward a certain community,” Lloyd said.
One of Lloyd’s classmates even designed an app to go along with this project. It will allow community members who cannot get inside the bus to select items they need, so a volunteer can hand it to them at one of their drop off locations.
BSU sponsor and Waggener teacher Laura Motley says she couldn’t be more proud of what her students have accomplished so far. Adding that some at the school live in the West End and see this issue firsthand.
Motley says once students from other parts of the city learned about this, they got to work on a solution.
“They’re really wanting to just give back to their communities and it makes me feel great because like I said, you know, these are kids who are doing something positive in the community and they’re breaking those stereotypes,” Motley said.
Lloyd adds, “It just makes me feel like that we’re kind of proving them wrong and that teenagers can have a voice and we’re young adults.”
The bus was gifted to the Waggener from Southern High School, which has an automotive program for students to take classes in. Southern students gutted the inside of the bus to prepare it for the next stage of renovation.
Once finished, the bus will be equipped with a sink for washing off food, several shelving units, and will be painted in a design picked out by the school’s students.
Those working on the Black Student Union’s food apartheid project say they hope to have the bus up and running by August, around the same time kids return to school.