By Samuel X. Cicci '15
Most Tuesday afternoons, Malcolm Oliver '26 can be seen pushing a large shopping cart through the Cash Saver grocer store in Midtown. Pizza ingredients, potatoes, fruit, pasta, and other snacks might be some of the items added to the pile, but they aren’t for a college cookout. Instead, Oliver spends his Tuesdays preparing and serving food to the hungry and homeless at a soup kitchen in the basement of St. John’s United Methodist Church in Midtown Memphis. The soup kitchen is part of the Laurence F. Kinney program, one of the many campus organizations now under the umbrella of the Lynne and Henry Turley Memphis Center for Community Engagement.
Rhodes first partnered with St. John’s to run the kitchen in 1988. Almost four decades later it’s still going strong, a testament to the college's continued commitment to service, and the students that have always embraced that ethos. For Oliver, it was trip to the Involvement Fair as a first-year that spurred is interest in the kitchen. The program had a vacancy and needed someone to coordinate planning, meal preparation, and gathering volunteers, and he decided that role was the right fit. Oliver has been a familiar face at St. John's since then.
"It was really just an opportunity that presented itself,” says the junior chemistry major, “and I’ve loved doing it ever since. It’s something that’s just become part of my routine. I’ll plan my class and lab schedule and other activities around the soup kitchen.”
Oliver normally heads to the grocery store around 1:30 p.m. to pick out supplies. A small number of students then typically join Oliver and St. John’s caretaker Rose Holmes after he finishes purchasing groceries. He and the others will slice fruit, baste buns for hamburgers, or do whatever prep work might be required before the afternoon’s meal begins at 4:30 p.m. The team will generally plate about 50 dinners, giving away most of it. Any extras will be handed out before the doors close at 5:30.
Despite the ‘soup’ moniker, Oliver switches up the kitchen’s menu on a regular basis to provide variety. “I don’t eat a lot of soup, so that’s not something that pops into my head when I’m thinking of recipes,” he says. “But after each session, I’ll spend the next week thinking of what we want to include. Other students will pitch in their ideas, and we’ll run with it. Nobody wants to eat the same thing every meal, so we try to provide lots of different options.
“Sometimes we’ll aim for a country meal, something like baked barbecue chicken thighs with a green bean salad or corn, maybe some Texas toast,” he continues. “Mashed potatoes are always a big hit, and we’ll usually bake dessert like cookies or brownies.” More involved weeks will see the students bake their own pizzas, while other menu items this year have included spaghetti, tacos, or burritos. “And yes, occasionally we will do soup,” adds Oliver.
The soup kitchen carries the weight of decades of alumni efforts and service. Talk to any alumni working in the nonprofit sector, and chances are they’ll have spent at least a few afternoons at St. John’s. For Oliver, the work is simply an extension of the type of person he’s become at Rhodes. “It’s a great opportunity to be connected to this long legacy of doing service in Memphis, but you don’t really think about the fact you’re in the longest-running student soup kitchen,” he says. “You just think about the fact that you get to make food with your friends, and it gets to go to a great cause every week.”
Oliver has his sights set on a job related to chemistry after he graduates, whether that’s pharmaceuticals, water safety, or even becoming a professor. Whatever his path may be, he knows that it will be a position where he can continue to give back. “Something I’ve learned in college is that there are things of high importance and low importance. Now, I really think community service should be higher on my list than maybe a leisure activity. You see a lot of people who do community service to tick a box, but I think at Rhodes you see people that do it simply because they love community service. At the kitchen, it’s one small way we can help people who are facing a poverty crisis here, and it’s a way to really get closer to our community outside campus.”
Don’t expect Oliver to step down from his position before he picks up his diploma; he plans to oversee the soup kitchen until his time at Rhodes is finished. Once he’s moved on, expect a new student to step up and take the reins, just as others have been doing for decades. “Once you get in the groove, other students hear about it and become interested, and we also see faculty and staff pitching in, too. This is just one small part of so much that’s happening in Memphis, and being at Rhodes is such an opportunity for us to have an impact on some of the issues facing this city.”
