Fostering Community Through Campus Dining at Hope College

College & University, Company, Featured, Insights

The dining hall often serves as a common meeting place for students and faculty across campus, but the right dining service provider can truly make it a community space. Learn more about how Creative Dining Services helped Rebekah Starkenburg foster a community-centered dining experience at Hope College.

Key Takeaways

Despite it not being required for all students, 80% of Hope College’s students are enrolled in a meal plan. The quality of food and community keeps students coming back for more.
Students have a wide variety of dietary restrictions and preferences. Creative Dining offers flexible options to accommodate students and faculty with food allergies, as well as vegan and vegetarian options.
Although it’s within walking distance of well-loved restaurants, students and faculty choose to dine on-campus for the vibrant community and good food.

Transcript

Creative is an organization that has been about community; it’s been about high-quality food experience.

I’m Becky Starkenburg and I serve as the Vice President for Student Formation and Dean of Students at Hope College.

When you’re looking for a dining provider, you’re always balancing bottom-line cost with the quality of the food and the experience for students. At Hope College, about 80% of our students are on our meal plan. Students who live in a residence hall are required to be on a plan in their first year. Then as students progress through our housing system, they can move into a cottage or an apartment. And then being on a meal plan is optional.

We work really hard to keep every student on our meal plan and we find that by and large, we’re able to do that because of the willingness that Creative brings to the table in flexing for our students’ needs.

We want our students to eat together and to have community. Students bring with them all kinds of different dietary needs. I have found that Creative Dining is incredibly willing to work with students, both through different features that they have in their program—like The Zone which is an allergen free station—or Options, which is just a little bit more do-it-yourself.

In addition to serving our students really well, Creative also manages a really robust catering enterprise. We have a multi-million dollar Summer Conference and Events program here that is really important for our bottom line, and Creative Dining manages the food for that entire program and really helps us reduce tuition for our students and support the overall educational enterprise of Hope.

There are a huge number of really popular restaurants within walking distance from campus and yet our faculty and staff often choose to eat here in our dining hall with students. Because it is such a vibrant place of community and the food’s great.

I just feel like with Creative, what you see is what you get. There aren’t hidden costs, there aren’t things that are surprising us from month to month. It lays a foundation of trust between two organizations that’s in the best interest of students.

I would absolutely recommend Creative Dining for any college. They’re a great collaborator and they care deeply about the people and the relationships. I feel like we have a really strong thing going with Creative Dining.

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