Food is a core part of building community, as Covenant College has discovered through the school’s partnership with Creative Dining Services. Hear from Dr. Brad Voyles, President of Covenant College, about how Creative Dining helped bring students and faculty together over a common desire: good food.

Key Takeaways 

• Good food is a central component of on-campus gatherings. Creative Dining’s offerings help make The Great Hall a popular community space for students to gather with friends and faculty members.
• Working with Creative Dining is a two-sided partnership, with the dining provider continuously seeking student and faculty feedback to ensure dining options align with everyone’s needs and expectations.
• Students appreciate having snack and drink options beyond the main dining hall. Blink, Covenant College’s retail and snack shop, offers quick and easy options for students to enjoy during early-morning meetups and late-night study sessions. 

Transcript 

Community is the word used most often when students talk about what they love the most. The Great Hall, where CDS provides the food, is the place where students gather together with their friends, their halls, or their faculty members and staff members for discipleship. The food is a central part of that. They gather around it and so this partnership that Covenant has with CDS probably is best exemplified right here as students, faculty and staff gather together around good food and for good fellowship as they grow together. 

My name is Brad Voyles and I’m the president of Covenant College. 

When I think back over previous relationships we’ve had with food service providers, they would probably more aptly be described as vendors or contracts. But when I think about CDS, it’s truly been a partnership. We’re in this together, working together to provide the best first-class food service for our students.

The food is excellent. There’s excellent coffee and breakfast items being served in the morning, and then good food for lunch and dinner into the late night. 

From the very beginning of the relationship, we noticed students being more pleased. And then as the years have gone by, now every summer we think through what’s something new we can add to the experience that students will return to, whether it’s a new menu cycle or a new station. We’re not satisfied just to stay where we are. We know it’s a continual opportunity to provide something new and good for our students.

I find CDS to be very open to feedback. They want to know how they can do better. They look for and solicit feedback from students regularly. They meet with our food service committee. They talk to senior leaders, to resident directors and others on the ground here so that they can continually be looking to improve quality of food and the experience for our student body and the entire community. 

We see more and more students coming to campus with dietary needs, and so CDS has been responsive to meet with students to figure out what they need. Each day, they provide allergen-free options on the line. But if there are special dietary needs, they’ll meet with those students to figure out what they can provide for them if it’s not on the line currently.

In addition to the good work that they’ve done here in our main dining facility, the work CDS has done in The Blink, our auxiliary space/ retail and snack shop, they’ve done a tremendous job in revitalizing it and making this space come alive. Students are there morning, noon and night enjoying the good food and fellowship together.

I would recommend CDS to other institutions because I truly view them as a partner, not as a contract. They are collaborative, they listen well, they are eager to serve the students. They want the students to have a good experience and as a president, that’s what I want as well.