42 minute read
The Big Question
Where should infrastructure investments in the U.S. start?
GREGG VANDERHEIDEN
PROFESSOR AND TRACE RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT CENTER DIRECTOR, COLLEGE OF INFORMATION STUDIES
Start with ensuring that everyone can access and use the internet. That includes not just the final mile (hooking up to their house) but the final foot (an interface that each person can use regardless of age, disability or technical skill).
MARVIN A. TITUS
ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF HIGHER EDUCATION, COLLEGE OF EDUCATION
More physical capital investment is needed to maintain aging buildings or construct new ones at public higher education institutions, which face extremely high deferred maintenance costs. This is particularly the case at historically Black and other institutions serving underrepresented minority students.
CARMEN CANTEMIR-STONE
BIOLOGY LECTURER, COLLEGE OF COMPUTER, MATHEMATICAL, AND NATURAL SCIENCES
Healthy people = healthy nation. So let’s include access to health care as “infrastructure”: reduced-cost insurance, medication, mental health care, and child care with art and sports programs, fresh food and veggies in food deserts, and access to clean water and safe housing.
JUNGHO KIM
PROFESSOR OF MECHANICAL ENGINEERING, A. JAMES CLARK SCHOOL OF ENGINEERING
Billions of dollars flow out of windows every year in the form of energy losses. We can cut these losses by at least half by eliminating the gas between the glass panes and using the resulting vacuum to produce windows whose performance approaches that of the walls around them. We have been developing these windows that are low-cost, reliable and extremely energy-efficient.
Share your answer and see more faculty responses at terp.umd.edu/BigQ12. Suggest a future question at terpfeedback.umd.edu.
THE BIG QUESTION
ADRIANNE FLYNN
SENIOR LECTURER AND INTERNSHIPS AND CAREER DEVELOPMENT DIRECTOR, PHILIP MERRILL COLLEGE OF JOURNALISM
When I am stuck in traffic to cross the Chesapeake Bay Bridge, I think about the waste of fuel, time and energy. What a sensible solution a ferry/bus line would be: Park on one side, jump on the ferry, grab a bus on the other side connecting to buses that run up and down the coast.
ALBERT “PETE” KYLE
CHARLES E. SMITH CHAIR PROFESSOR OF FINANCE, ROBERT H. SMITH SCHOOL OF BUSINESS
Infrastructure investment should look forward into the 21st century, including improving roadways for self-driving cars and building bullet-train infrastructure, battery technology for storing solar, wind and nuclear energy, aircraft monitoring technology for managing skies filled with drones, personal aircraft and large airplanes, and super-high-speed internet.
PRESSING
PLAY ESPORTS HAVE BECOME AN INTERNATIONAL PHENOMENON. WITH TERPS ALREADY COMPETING AT THE HIGHEST LEVELS, UMD POWERS UP SUPPORT FOR GAMERS. BY LIAM FARRELL ILLUSTRATION BY RYAN INZANA
RENDAN HEGARTY GRASPED EARLY
in his first semester at the University of Maryland that the lectures, papers and tests of college life weren’t squaring with his constant urge to slip away to an exotic island where he could practice skydiving, bunker construction and cold-blooded sniping of his enemies.
A $30 million prize pool up for grabs didn’t hurt, either.
So in a Fall 2018 departure possible only in the digital age, he temporarily traded in his student ID for a chance to secure a spot in the lucrative championship of a sport that requires those survival skills—albeit only in a world made up of electrons and transistors.
“I figured I should just focus on one,” says Hegarty ’23. “Fortnite was not gonna wait for me.”
Hegarty’s attempt to go pro in that video game, a global phenomenon created by Tim Sweeney ’93’s Epic Games, is just one point on the scoreboard showing the rise of so-called “esports” from a niche cultural curiosity to a billion-dollar industry that fills arenas, streams to millions of fans and awards huge prizes.
Esports has also leveled up at colleges and universities, graduating from student union arcades and dorm room GoldenEye 007 sessions to full-blown institutional interest. Across the country, higher education has started doling out scholarships and investing in the uniforms, hardware and building space needed to compete, like in traditional sports.
And while UMD is only beginning to dip its toes into the deep end, gaming grassroots have already grown strong in College Park with students like Hegarty. Despite falling just short in Fortnite World Cup qualification and keeping his promise to return to UMD rather than hold on to a full-time pursuit of esports, he hasn’t disconnected his keyboard yet: So far, Hegarty has earned about $35,000 in cash prizes and scholarships from his gaming exploits.
“I stuck to my word,” he says. “I still made a pretty good amount of money.”
COMPETITION ITSELF has always been part of video games, be it chasing the high score on Centipede at the local pizza parlor or the well-documented quest for the world record on Donkey Kong.
BThe first known tournament took place in 1972 at Stanford University’s Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. The 20 or so players there squared off in Spacewar!, pounding buttons to pilot triangle spaceships and fire dot missiles at each other. The last player standing amid the pixelated debris took home the grand prize: a year’s subscription to Rolling Stone magazine. The advent of one-on-one fighting arcade games like Street Fighter 2 and Mortal Kombat supercharged the scene in the 1990s before advances in console, computing and internet technology turned multiplayer gaming competitions into a genuine international powerhouse. By 2017, the “Bird’s Nest” stadium in Beijing, built for the Summer Olympics, hosted the League of Legends World Championship with as much flair as any other sporting event, opening the final rounds with musical acts, choreographed dancers and even an augmented-reality dragon swooping through the venue before stone-faced competitors in matching corporate-sponsored outfits squared off for millions of dollars. The COVID-19 pandemic, forcing the cancellation of in-person activities worldwide, was a ready-made pivot point for esports; its audience grew nearly 10% last year to 435.9 million people, according to Newzoo, a gaming analytics firm that has projected a further 9% growth in 2021. The opportunity to fill the suddenly empty hours didn’t go unnoticed by traditional sports media, either; ESPN aired a tournament of 16 NBA players taking on each other in NBA 2K20, and FOX Sports even showed NASCAR drivers competing in virtual races. Overall, esports is capitalizing on younger millennial and Generation Z consumers whose childhoods were filled with these types of games, says Hank Boyd, clinical professor in the Robert H. Smith School of Business’ marketing department. Competition organizers, he says, have also had the foresight to combine gaming with other forms of entertainment to hold attention spans—for example, a Lil Nas X performance hosted last November by the Roblox platform garnered 33 million views and, a few months earlier, several Fortnite shows by rapper Travis Scott collected 45.8 million views. In other words, you can feast on not only a gaming version of the Super Bowl, but also its halftime show. “It’s a game, but it’s really more than a game,” Boyd says. “This is something that’s defining a generation.”
TRADITIONALISTS IN THE ATHLETIC
world have worn trenches in their foreheads from furrowed brows over all this, unable to move beyond the pesky “sports” embedded in “esports.”
For someone used to viewing competitive actions that have no virtual intermediary—baseball players swinging a real bat that hits a real ball, basketball players jumping and slamming a real ball through a real hoop—the visual disconnect between a stationary row of people clacking computer controls and Jumbotrons streaked with whirling warriors can be jarring. Then there’s navigating the sharp learning curve in understanding the multicolored chaos splashing across those screens, particularly in a game such as League of Legends, wherein teams of otherworldly “champions” with different skills and abilities battle each other to destroy the glowing, crystal “nexus” inside the enemy’s base.
The dialogue on the issue can range from the considered to the stereotyped. In one 2013 roundtable discussion from HBO’s “Real Sports with Bryant Gumbel,” some panelists advocated for a distinction between “sports,” which necessitate substantial physical exertion, and “games,” which require competitive skills but lack any strenuous athletic demands. Other commentators were far more dismissive, however, wondering “How many of those people also go to ‘Star Trek’ conventions?” and the well-known sportswriter Frank Deford labeling esports viewers as “crazier than the ones playing.”
But from a spectacle standpoint, it’s undeniable that sports and esports do share a great deal. Both genres have studio announcers and postgame interviews, ecstatic winners and heartbroken losers, cocky superstars and pantheon achievements (check out “EVO Moment #37,” for one example). Scientifically, there is a relationship as well—a 2016 study from the German Sports University found esports players surpass table tennis in terms of hand-eye coordination demands, produce stress-induced cortisol levels similar to racecar drivers and have heart rates approaching marathon runners’.
So it’s not a surprise that someone like Will Vickers ’21 wound up playing a role in the UMD gaming community. A varsity athlete at Bishop McNamara High School in Forestville, Md., who played baseball at the College of Southern Maryland before transferring to UMD in 2019, Vickers found a new outlet in College Park for those same competitive instincts. This time, however, he traded in a bat, ball and glove for the futuristic weapons, electric charges and bomb-hunting of Valorant.
“I still like traditional sports,” says Vickers. “I put esports on the same level as them.”
He was also social media manager for the UMCP Gaming Club, a student-born and -run group that boasts more than 1,800 members and 50 competitors who take part in tournaments as Terp teams.
“Gaming is not taboo,” Vickers says. “People are like, ‘You play games? What do you play?’”
—HANK BOYD, CLINICAL PROFESSOR OF MARKETING,
ROBERT H. SMITH SCHOOL OF BUSINESS
GIVEN THE DEMOGRAPHICS—a 2018 poll found that 58% of Americans ages 14 to 21 had played video games competitively—higher education was destined to become a fertile field for esports.
Smaller schools were some of the earliest to jump on the bandwagon for various institutional and cultural reasons, seeing them as a way to bolster everything from student enrollment to campus pride. In 2014, Robert
Esports fans cheer during the finals of the 2019 Fortnite World Cup held at New York City’s Arthur Ashe Stadium. While once a niche attraction, these competitions can now draw tens of thousands for inperson contests.
Terp gamers, including Matthew Eye ’22 (facing page), come together at the 2019 Harvest Moon LAN (local area network) event in the Computer Science Intructional Center hosted by UMCP Gaming. The group is a community of more than 1,800 members and dozens of high-level competitors. Morris University Illinois became the first college to promote esports to a varsity competition, launching a League of Legends team with up to 50% tuition and 50% roomand-board scholarships for eligible gamers. Since then, more than 170 schools with varsity esports programs have joined together in the National Association of Collegiate Esports, representing more than 5,000 student-athletes and $16 million in scholarships and aid.
Within a 250-mile radius of College Park, however, the vast majority of these varsity programs are at schools that otherwise compete in Division III, and none has football in the so-called Power Five conferences, the general marker of top-tier collegiate athletics programs. While it’s clear how select student gamers would benefit from the uniforms, equipment, facilities and increased prestige that would come with a varsity designation, it’s less obvious at this nascent stage for a university like UMD, which has legions of fans devoted to traditional athletics programs, an already-large base of STEM students and plenty of existing opportunities for Terps to compete at tournaments.
UMCP Gaming, for example, has put teams into the American Video Game League, North American Competitive Collegiate Series, Collegiate Open League and other competitions for thousands of dollars in prizes. In the Collegiate Star League, UMD teams were collectively ranked fourth at the end of last year, behind only the University of Ottawa, the University of CaliforniaBerkeley and Northeastern University.
In December, the trio of Hegarty, Erik “Mars” Kelemen ’22 and Mazin “Se7enn” Karjikar ’24 split $15,000 in tuition prize money by taking first place in the PlayVS collegiate Fortnite league affiliated with Epic Games. In March, Hegarty and Kelemen divvied up another $1,000 from topping the AVGL Collegiate Champions League.
So far, the institutional footprint at UMD has been limited to intramural, one-on-one competitions in franchises like NBA2K, Madden football and FIFA Soccer, in addition to Fortnite and team leagues for Rocket League. But new opportunities are coming—University Recreation and Wellness (RecWell) is hiring its first esports coordinator, for example, to give the same administrative support around facilities, travel and fundraising that club sports like crew, rugby and ultimate Frisbee already enjoy. Other ideas under consideration include repurposing underused racquetball courts in the Eppley Recreation Center for club esports teams and the general student body, or putting aside space in The Diner after a new north campus dining hall opens.
UMD is also analyzing what peer institutions such as Ohio State, Rutgers and Penn State have furnished for esports, and is identifying approximate space and technology needs, says Jay Gilchrist, director of RecWell. The pandemic, however, short-circuited early discussions, and an ensuing budget crunch plus an ongoing premium on available campus space will remain considerations.
“(Gamers) get an incredible sense of pride representing the university. That’s one of the things any university is looking for in the long run,” Gilchrist says. “It’s just going to have to be an organically grown thing.”
Hegarty, for his part, thinks UMD—and college esports in general—are a sleeping giant. Now the president of UMCP Gaming and a campus ambassador for the Alienware brand of gaming products from Dell, he believes it’s only a matter of time before warring leagues consolidate and push in a unified direction.
“In a few years it will be that way,” he says. “Everyone is fighting for that market share.”
—JAY GILCHRIST, DIRECTOR OF UNIVERSITY RECREATION AND WELLNESS
WHILE A DECADE of glowing headlines may suggest unending progress toward esports domination, some skeptics believe it has already reached its ceiling.
They question whether event viewership numbers have been artificially inflated by seeding live video streams into unrelated websites, and if the dominance of publishers—whose ultimate goal is to sell games and consoles to players rather than attract casual viewers—will limit esports competitions to hardcore gamers instead of appealing to the general public. (The NFL, for example, does not ultimately measure its success by the number of footballs sold.)
And despite its digital lifeblood, esports has faced its share of COVID-19 challenges as well. ESPN eliminated its entire staff of esports writers last year as part of widespread company layoffs, judging the topic still too niche-oriented for the investment and not requiring the attention of a dedicated team of reporters. Organizers for the Dota 2 championships, one of the industry’s most lucrative with a $40 million prize pool, had to scramble in summer 2021 for an alternate location after the Swedish government wouldn’t classify it as an “elite sporting event” and grant visas for traveling participants.
Inside the esports scene itself, some high-profile stars have also burned out on competing professionally and switched to streaming content on platforms such as Twitch. Enver Rahman ’20 is making a go of that latter approach, and the computer science graduate from Rockville, Md., has nearly 8,000 followers for his instructional and coaching streams on League of Legends.
Rahman, who works as a software engineer for Infosys, likens the game to “fast-paced chess,” and found that his intellectual grasp of game strategy outpaced his physical reflexes for controlling the characters. He’s keeping an eye out for potential coaching positions in esports and hopes to one day be there full-time.
“There’s two teams going at it. It’s the exact same concept (as traditional sports), just virtual,” he says. “I love helping people become better players.”
The size of that player pool likely depends on fixing some notorious systemic cultural issues. Black players often see racial slurs in live comment sections while competing, and women can face debilitating hostility. “Gamergate,” an internet controversy that originated in 2014 with innuendos about relationships between developers and journalists, metastasized across social media sites into a full-blown culture war of accusations, harassment, and rape and death threats slung at female gamers attempting to diversify the community and its content.
Some issues have occurred in the UMCP Gaming chats on the social network site Discord, says Adeline Wu ’23, vice president of competitive for the group who uses they and them pronouns. While the tenor of the dialogue has improved over time, Wu says slurs and demeaning insults can still pop up, and they have even gotten some criticism for including preferred pronouns in their officer bio.
“When you play video games often, especially competitive ones, people will let the competition show a harsher side of themselves,” they say.
But the collegial environment in College Park has generally lent itself to more friendly and accepting interactions between gamers than in the wider Internet, says Jane Mendez ’24, an officer in UMCP Gaming who coordinates games in Team Fortress 2, a multiplayer first-person shooter title. She believes more consistent opportunities, promotion and support for female esports players at gaming’s top levels would open doors for younger competitors.
“I think we’ll see more female teams and leagues specifically for girls,” Mendez says. “It can be intimidating going on a team of all guys.”
However the larger trends evolve, Vickers is confident that UMD—with its large base of students, successful gamers and vibrant science, technology, engineering and math programs—is positioned to be a force in an industry still finding it way.
“It’s in its infancy stage,” he says. “Give it five to 10 years.” terp
BY ANNIE DANKELSON
PHOTOS B Y J O H N T. CO NSOLI
HOW TERPS COOKED UP FOOD RECOVERY NETWORK 10 YEARS AGO AND GREW IT INTO A NATIONWIDE HUNGER AND WASTE-FIGHTING FORCE
MAYBE IT’S THAT EXTRA TRAY of chicken fingers that just wasn’t sold before closing time. Or those hot dogs still warming behind the concession stand counter after the big game. Or who really thought the conference attendees would polish off all those sandwich platters?
Up to 40% of all food in the U.S. goes to waste, according to the Food and Drug Administration, about one pound per person per day, and exceeding 81.4 billion pounds in 2017.
A decade ago this fall, a small group of Terps took notice—and took action. Instead of letting perfectly good but unserved food at the University of Maryland hit the trash can, they rerouted it to those in need at local homeless shelters and kitchens.
The effort required careful coordination, late nights at the dining halls and a few spaghetti-sauce-stained car trunks, but the seemingly simple idea caught on: Food Recovery Network (FRN) has spread to 172 campuses in 46 states and D.C., with almost 5 million pounds of food diverted from dumpsters and more than 4 million meals donated.
As the nationwide nonprofit—arguably UMD’s greatest Do Good success—celebrates its 10th anniversary, the co-founders, supporters and partners who made it possible tell its story.
IT STARTED WITH A PIZZA
In 2008, Evan Ponchick ’12 was hosting his brother for a visit when they stopped for dinner at the Stamp Student Union’s Food Court.
EVAN PONCHICK
FRN co-founder, now applied analytics manager at Genentech and FRN Board of Advisors member
We went and ordered some pizza, and then it was around closing time. Three pizzas were out. I inquired, like, “Hey, what happens to those? Do you bring them home?” They’re like, “No, we have to throw them away.”
He soon noticed that this wasn’t an isolated issue.
PONCHICK I played on the club Ultimate Frisbee team, and after practice, I would sprint up to the South Campus Dining Hall so I could get there before they closed down. One night, I see in the chicken finger display, there were, like, 25 of them. And they rolled the trash can over and were starting to throw them all out. And I was like, “No, don’t do that!”
He wanted to do something about it. In Spring 2010, he joined his brothers and sisters in Alpha Phi Omega (APO), a co-ed community service fraternity, serving at So Others Might Eat (SOME), a nonprofit that feeds those in need in D.C.
PONCHICK I said, “Wait a second. This is incredible. What if I was able to retrieve some of those chicken tenders from the dining hall and bring them over here and serve them here?”
He reached out to SOME, whose staff was happy to accept food on Friday nights to serve the next day for breakfast or lunch. He just needed permission from Dining Services.
COLLEEN WRIGHT-RIVA
Director of Dining Services and FRN Board of Advisors member
When he came to me, he was just so enthusiastic and so willing to do whatever it would take to solve the food waste problem. I also remember having to kind of give him—I hate to say this—kind of a dose of reality around the way the food system works.
Wright-Riva had tried a similar food recovery idea at Cornell University, where she’d previously worked.
WRIGHT-RIVA When you’re feeding somebody in a shelter or in a church, you want enough for everybody. Some of my
skepticism was, will we be able to recover enough food that students can actually find someone to take it? So that was kind of the obstacle I put in front of them: Go out there and find some organizations that will take this eclectic smorgasbord of food. Then I said, also, we can’t add the labor or the transportation cost to deliver this food, so we’ve got to have a mechanism that will pass muster in food safety rules.
With multiple meetings, SOME’s cooperation and APO members’ agreement to use their own cars, the first food recovery took place on Sept. 17, 2010, then each Friday that semester. The volunteers packed up pasta, breadsticks, veggies, meat—anything the dining halls couldn’t serve that day.
PONCHICK We met up as a group outside South Campus Dining Hall 15 minutes before closing. One (Dining Services) representative would come by, and they would go and grab the leftover food. We would be responsible for scooping it into the aluminum containers that we brought. We would stack them up, and once it was all loaded, we’d clean everything up, put everything away. And then we’d roll the cart with all the food over to the freight elevator, go down one floor to the loading dock, and then I would come over there with my car. We would drive in, throw on the little CD mix, go into SOME—they would be there waiting and ready. I’ll never forget the big smiles and their handshakes.
Around the same time, Ben Simon ’14 had started a separate community service club on campus, the Love Movement, and similarly noticed the food waste problem.
BEN SIMON
National FRN co-founder and founding executive director, co-founder and former CEO of Imperfect Foods
There was a time when my friends and I would actually eat off of the conveyer belts—it was in my grungier days when I was really broke as a college student, and it served two purposes of (feeding) myself and also preventing food waste. From there, we met with Colleen, and she had mentioned Evan’s thing, the APO food recovery and donation project that she had just, like a week or two before, given permission to start up in South Campus Dining Hall.
The Love Movement joined APO on recoveries in Spring 2011, allowing the effort to expand to multiple nights per week.
MIA ZAVALIJ ’14
National FRN co-founder, former Love Movement member, now co-founder and food recovery consultant at Eatable
It was such a simple and effective process— just packaging everything up and then driving it 15, 20 minutes down the road and seeing that immediate impact.
MAKING IT OFFICIAL
That fall, as Ponchick focused as a senior on securing internships, Simon took the reins and established Food Recovery Network as a UMD club in September 2011.
SIMON There was a First Look Fair at the start of that 2011 school year, and all the students were sort of on one side of the tables, signing up for clubs. We actually went behind the tables so that we could have more direct, more intimate conversations with the leaders of all the different student groups.
That led to around a dozen clubs— including ROTC, religious organizations and activist group Community Roots—joining the cause, each taking different nights of the week to recover food on campus. After easing some concerns about liability by researching laws like the federal Bill Emerson Good Samaritan Food Donation Act, which protects food donors who give to nonprofits, FRN soon spread to 251 North and the Diner, catered on-campus events, and football and basketball games.
ANDREW BRESEE ’14
National FRN co-founder, now Software engineer at Affirm Inc. It felt almost like covert ops or like vigilantism or something like that, because as soon as the food gets off of its heating elements, it’s like the (clock) starts ticking, like how much time is left before you can actually donate it. So we were running through the halls and, you know, there are people leaving the game, and it was fun. It was fun and scrappy.
FRN learned to sync the timing and logistics at each recovery location that semester with the help of a recipient just over a mile from campus.
BEN SLYE
Pastor at Christian Life Center in Riverdale, Md., and CEO of Passion and Compassion Outreach Ministry
We talked about cars being “baptized,” because food would just come out of the trays onto (students’) cars. So we learned how to put plastic down. Then we had to learn at what temperature we need to refrigerate the food.
CAM PASCUAL ’15
National FRN co-founder, Eatable co-founder, now senior program officer at the World Wildlife Fund
It was sometimes discouraging. Like we’d have people sign up for food recovery, and then not show up. Students, they just have so much going on that you can be kind of flaky, especially if you have a test coming up and you were like, “Oh, this sounds great. Let me sign up for it.” And then it’s 8 in the morning and you’re like, “I don’t actually want to do that.”
SLYE Whatever challenge that we came up with, we just faced, because we knew that this food was going to feed people that were hungry. Bringing this food in, I mean, it was like you were giving the (elderly) a million dollars when they would have a piece of meat, pasta, rice and vegetables. The reaction was incredible.
TO BROWN, AND BEYOND
After growing within UMD’s campus early that Fall 2011 semester, FRN’s co-founders saw a chance to go bigger. Simon reached out to Ben Chesler, a friend at Brown University. Simon had invited him to Love Movement meetings while Chesler was interning in D.C. and mentioned the early food recovery effort.
BEN CHESLER
National FRN co-founder, co-founder of Imperfect, now associate director of entrepreneurship at the Roux Institute at Northeastern University
He said, “Hey, this Food Recovery Network has taken off. We’re recovering a lot of food. You had said you wanted to do something at Brown. Do you want to actually put your money where your mouth is?”
Brown’s chapter followed a similar story to UMD’s, with confidence from its dining services overcoming some initial skepticism. That set the blueprint for further expansion, with Pomona College and the University of California, Berkeley soon joining.
SIMON We had this toolkit of materials, a packet of four or five PDFs that we would send to every new chapter as we were coaching them through starting. One of the materials was basically giving Colleen and other directors of dining services as references for Food Recovery Network to say, “Yes, we do this with students at our school. It works with us. We would 100% recommend you do it.”
WRIGHT-RIVA I got calls from other directors at other schools just saying, “Is it working? Is it a pain in the neck, or are you actually seeing momentum?” And I was able to tell our story, and I think most of the directors that called me ended up having their school run with the program as well.
UP TO THE CHALLENGE
When FRN started recruiting additional campus chapters, it entered, among other pitch competitions, UMD’s first Do Good Challenge in Spring 2012.
BOB GRIMM
Levenson Family Chair in Philanthropy and Nonprofit Leadership, Do Good Institute director, professor of the practice and founding chair of FRN’s Board of Directors
(Philanthropists) Bruce and Karen Levenson’s nephew was working with the actor Kevin Bacon, so they asked if we wanted to do something with Kevin. Collectively, a bunch of students and us came up with the idea of the Do Good Challenge, where Kevin would do a video wearing a Fear the Turtle shirt and challenge students to do as much good as they could.
The competition invited student teams to pitch their social solutions to a panel of judges and an audience of more than 700 in what was described as “a cross between ‘Shark Tank’ and ‘American Idol.’” The winning idea would receive a $5,000 grand prize.
SIMON Andrew and I probably practiced our pitch a hundred different times. We had some humor in there. One of our goals was to “get Loh,” and we used a Lil Jon meme—this was in the early days of memes—and just the whole audience cracked up. (We had gotten President [Wallace] Loh to come along on recovery with us.)
GRIMM They did a nice job of being inspiring, being entertaining and also painting a picture of what their great potential was in the future.
The prep paid off, and FRN was crowned Maryland’s first Do Good Challenge champion.
SIMON As soon as it was over and they gave us the award, the audience started to file out, but the press came up, and they were snapping photos of us. We jumped offstage, and it felt like a mob of press just asking us questions.
BRESEE That really helped catapult Food Recovery Network into the main spotlight. That was really exciting, because it became a lot easier then to tell universities (about us), to have legitimacy.
After the challenge, FRN received free office space from the university’s Academy for Innovation and Entrepreneurship. Grimm joined as founding chair of its board of directors and was instrumental in securing early funders. The club incorporated into an official nonprofit in Fall 2012, and by the following spring had earned a $150,000 grant from the Sodexo Stop Hunger Foundation. Simon, Zavalij and Pascual became full-time FRN employees.
GRIMM I had foundation friends who said, “Come back to me in a few years.” I was like, “That isn’t really helping us right now. If we can’t get going in the first few years, it won’t really be helpful if you’re interested in this three years from now.” Sodexo gets a lot of credit for taking a risk.
EXPANDING THE FOOD WASTE FIGHT
During the 2013-14 academic year, what ultimately became known as the Do Good Institute funded Evan Lutz ’14 in what’s now called the Impact Interns program with FRN. During his experience, he took the lead on a
new waste-fighting idea: selling local farmers’ surplus produce to college students. The initiative, called Recovered Food CSA (Community-Supported Agriculture), took off, with Lutz and others packing onions, potatoes and apples—regardless of how they looked—into their cars and selling them outside the Stamp. After competing as a finalist in the 2014 Do Good Challenge, Lutz joined Simon to turn the startup into Hungry Harvest, a Baltimore-based company that has recovered 30 million pounds of produce in seven years.
EVAN LUTZ
Co-founder and CEO of Hungry Harvest I’m not a classroom learner. I am boots on the ground. I have to learn by experience. What Food Recovery Network did was, they gave me a framework as a backbone to really start a business within the business.
Simon eventually sold his stake to start a similar business on the West Coast with Chesler: Imperfect, which sells “quirky” or odd-shaped produce and other groceries through direct deliveries. Last year alone, it served 400,000 customers and saved over 50 million pounds of food.
SIMON It’s really crazy if you think about it, because Food Recovery Network has continued to grow, and then the ugly produce movement, which has now expanded into the world of grocery and this larger food recovery movement with Imperfect and Hungry Harvest—so much of this was started right at the University of Maryland.
WRIGHT-RIVA I’m just thrilled that we were the founding school and that I was the director here at the time, that I was able to say yes. As a department, we’ve done things to launch the Campus Pantry, to partner with others for the Farmers Market and Terp Farm. So to see our own department really gravitate around trying to solve important issues around food just makes me happy.
As FRN continues to expand across the nation, the original co-founders have spread out as well. Some send the occasional text or meet for coffee. Others speak at each other’s weddings. And some have lost touch or pivoted to other careers. But they all look back fondly at Food Recovery Network’s growth and impact.
PASCUAL I feel like the best part, even when we were part of it, was it didn’t feel like it was our thing. It felt like it was a really grassroots movement.
PONCHICK You never know, one Friday night in your junior year of college could turn into a full-blown national nonprofit organization that’s going for 10 years strong. terp
For two decades, a UMD professor has led a writing workshop for Holocaust survivors. Seventy-six years after World War II’s end, their
task has an urgency both personal and public. BY SALA LEVIN ’10
n 1964, Peter Gorog and a few friends hitchhiked from the southern border of their native Hungary some 800 miles north to the Baltic Sea. Along the way, they passed through Warsaw, where a monument commemorated the 1943 ghetto uprising. Gorog wanted to stop there. It was the closest thing he could imagine to a gravesite for his father.
Born in Budapest in 1941, Gorog was the son of Olga, a hatmaker, and Arpad, an office manager.
“It wasn’t a good place to be born in a Jewish family,” says Gorog. During Olga’s pregnancy, Arpad was conscripted into forced labor, and was allowed to meet his son only for a short time three months after his birth. In 1942, Arpad was sent to Ukraine. The Hungarian Ministry of Defense declared him dead in January 1943.
Twenty-one years later, Gorog sneaked out early one morning in Warsaw to stand before the 36-foot stone wall depicting the leaders of the uprising emerging in bronze. There, free from the state-mandated forgetting imposed by formerly German-allied Hungary, he felt a connection to the man he never knew. “That was the first time I related to the Holocaust and to what happened to the Jewish people and personally to my father.”
Yet even after he defected from socialist Hungary to the United States in 1980 and began talking about his wartime experiences—from living in a protected apartment purchased by Swedish architect and humanitarian Raoul Wallenberg to being liberated from the Budapest ghetto in 1945— his memories of that morning in Warsaw remained buried. What shook them loose decades later was a prompt handed out in a writing workshop run by a University of Maryland faculty member.
The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s bimonthly “Echoes of Memory” program for survivors who volunteer, now marking its 20th year, is many things to many people: a community where those who lived through the
Peter Gorog and his mother, Olga, posed for a portrait in post-World War II Hungary; today a U.S. citizen/resident, Gorog (far left) reflects on his father’s death in the Holocast for a remembrance project.
Holocaust can connect with others, a space to make meaning of their experiences, and—a writer’s perpetual frenemy—a deadline.
Margaret Polizos Peterson Ph.D. ’14, assistant clinical professor in the College of Education and workshop leader since its start, recalls that in the beginning, most participants were older survivors who had endured ghettos and concentration camps and were determined to ensure that history was written by those who had lived it. Facts, dates, names, who was lost from the family—that’s what they focused on.
Now, as the number of those survivors continues to dwindle and members of a younger generation who were children during the war assume prominence, the urgency of preserving their memories remains, but a more nuanced understanding of their task has emerged: one that recognizes that remembering a traumatic life event is a necessarily subjective project.
“One of the survivors said this great thing which sticks in my mind,” says Peterson. “She said, ‘I don’t write a fact, ever.’ What she meant was, ‘I’m telling my story. I’m telling the experience that I lived.’”
Many survivors still feel the desire to solidify history in writing, says Peterson. But many also feel a more personal mission to tell their grandchildren and great-grandchildren that they were there, and how that felt. n a spring afternoon, nine Holocaust survivors and I gathered in a video conference to discuss their writing. My own maternal grandparents were born to Jewish families in 1911 and 1917 in Poland. Each survived ghettos and concentration camps with just one brother apiece; the rest of their families died. They wrote down nothing in their lifetimes, but my mother heard enough to know an outline of their histories—inherited knowledge for which my brother and I will one day be entirely responsible.
The survivors were mostly gray- and whitehaired, some wearing glasses, sitting amid an array of houseplants, bookshelves and framed art. Many had built up a familial ease after years of attending the workshop together; Gorog shared a photo of his newest granddaughter. One woman summed up her experiences with a disarming nonchalance, one that comes with having shared one’s story many times among a group that can relate: “Nothing terribly special,” she said. “I went to Auschwitz and survived.”
They read aloud the writings that they’d prepared on a pre-assigned theme: something untranslatable. They joked about expressions from their native languages: “Don’t trust the goat with your cabbage” from Hungarian, “You can’t dance with one rear end at two
weddings” from Yiddish. Peterson asked frank questions. “How did your mom describe death to you?” she wondered aloud to one survivor.
Peterson describes herself as the ideal kind of person to facilitate these discussions. From her outsider perspective, she can ask for simple details that draw out deeper context in writing.
“I very much try to take the position of a careful reader,” says Peterson. “I’m not their kid, I’m not their contemporary, I’m not Jewish, I’m not a survivor. I’m only a really good reader who wants to know more.”
Twenty years ago, Peterson was a writing instructor at Anne Arundel Community College when her photograph appeared in Annapolis’ Capital Gazette newspaper in a story about a poetry anthology. Soon, an employee of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum called her, asking if she wanted to get involved with a workshop it was launching.
At first, Peterson was unsure, considering herself unqualified. “I knew what a person who has a college degree knows about the Holocaust,” she says. But the Anne Arundel County native knew about writing, having studied poetry as an undergraduate at St. Mary’s College of Maryland and in graduate school at Johns Hopkins.
She also knew that writing could be a means to explore some of life’s most pressing questions. “I wasn’t raised in a religious tradition. So to me, poetry was my first sacred text,” says Peterson. “I was like, ‘These are people questing around for answers to big questions.’”
eginning in
earnest in the 1990s, survivors were at the center of an intense effort to capture their testimonies, including at the University of Southern California’s Shoah Foundation, established in 1994 by Steven Spielberg. It now houses more than 54,000 video recordings. The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum’s collection holds some 25,000 oral testimonies.
Echoes of Memory, inspired by a similar program at Drew University’s Center for Holocaust/ Genocide Study in New Jersey, was another way— in addition to video and audio interviews—to ask Washington, D.C.-area survivors about their experiences, says Diane Saltzman, director of survivor affairs at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.
What made a writing workshop unique, she says, was that it asked survivors not only to tell their stories, but also to share them with other survivors as they were being captured. “The feedback and the give-and-take doesn’t happen with other forms of testimony,” she says.
Peterson’s early attempts to lead a workshop about such an immense tragedy sometimes failed. “I thought I had to focus in on the most terrible memories,” she says. “It was a beginner’s mistake.” Now, she says, she offers general prompts—on food, holiday traditions, school, family—that allow people to delve deep or go for something lighter. “I put the chicken on the table, they take the piece they want.”
Responses about the untranslatable ran the gamut of emotions. Al Munzer, born in 1941 in the Nazi-occupied Netherlands, recalled the lullaby sung to him by the Indonesian caretaker of the family that sheltered him until he was reunited with his mother after the war. German-born Susan Warsinger mused on the importance of the Yiddish word machatunim, which describes the relationship between a married couple’s two sets of parents.
Al Munzer’s family gathered for a meal before being torn apart by war (left); two sisters who held him as a baby (above right) died at Auschwitz. Perhaps imagination is the purview of the young and like other more tangible faculties diminishes as we get older. I cannot pinpoint the time when the undeniable reality of the death of my sisters extinguished the last glimmer of hope of seeing them alive. But for the past 20 years I have been lighting memorial candles on the Hebrew date corresponding to February 11, 1944. ... On rare occasions, I have allowed myself to believe in an afterlife, a time when I might finally embrace my dad and my sisters. But like my mother, I am too anchored in reality to allow such musings for long.
—Al Munzer
Susan Warsinger, of Bad Kreuznach, Germany, helped her mother, Annie Hilsenrath (left), push her baby brother, Joseph, before the war.
Peterson’s role, as she sees it, is to “get (the piece of writing) to be able to do what it is trying to do,” she says. “I also tell them, ‘You’re the writer—if you don’t like my idea, don’t do it.’” Each year, writings from the workshop are published both online and in print.
The members of the workshop, which has been meeting virtually since the beginning of the pandemic, note that the relationships they’ve built over the years are a critical component of the program. Theirs is a bond forged by commonalities—discrimination, loss, immigration. “It’s not the same as being a family, but it is a sort of family,” says Halina Peabody. (She noted that the widows and divorcees of the group have a single-women’s club.)
“While we were meeting personally, it was just good to hug each other and talk through life a little bit,” says Gorog. “Unfortunately, some of them are not with us anymore. That’s a tragedy, unfortunately, we have to deal with.”
Peterson has also developed deep attachments with the survivors over the years. Inspired by her work with the group, she wrote her doctoral dissertation on using writing as a way of making meaning of one’s life after the Holocaust. As she talked with the survivors for her project, their connection grew—and so did Peterson’s sometimes-consuming fascination with the Holocaust. Her own son, she says, developed a “real fear” of Nazis as a child when conversations about the genocide spilled over into their home.
Knowing survivors so intimately “makes all this evil, all the badness, closer to home in a way that is depressing and frightening,” Peterson says. “You have experience of loving these people, and you can’t believe that the world could have been so bad.”
eventy-six years after the end of World War II, mortality is a constant undertone to any discussion involving Holocaust survivors. It weighs heavily on those in the workshop. “I’m 88 years old. How long have I got?” asks Peabody. “Everybody’s very, very worried about dying.”
The pressing drive to get everything down on paper before it’s too late feels urgent to many. “Whatever we capture, at a certain point, that’s all that we will have,” says Saltzman.
For survivors like Peabody, telling their
story is a calling. In 1942, as a 9-year-old, she, her mother and her baby sister boarded a train in Poland carrying papers her mother had bought identifying them as Catholic. The four-day, fournight journey would, Peabody’s mother thought, bring them to a safer location.
On the train, a man pressured Peabody’s mother into revealing that they were Jewish. He told her that when they arrived at their destination, a town called Jarosław, he’d turn them over to the Gestapo. The family waited tensely for the train ride to be over, and when they arrived in Jarosław, the man escorted them off the train. “I started pulling at my mother, saying, ‘I don’t want to die,’” says Peabody.
Her mother appealed to the man, giving him all of her possessions and money, and asking why he’d want their blood on his conscience. He stopped, returned a portion of the money to Peabody’s mother, and let them go, warning that they were likely to face a slower, more painful death elsewhere. (In fact, Peabody’s sister and parents survived the war.) Today, Peabody knows that time is short, and that only she can tell others her story and the messages it carries. “I feel now it’s an obligation. I need to remind people what happened,” she says. “If I don’t speak up, what does that make me?”
The fear of forgetting is a familiar one to me. I can still see my grandfather in his favorite flat cap, carrying the doughnuts he always brought us, but to my young nephew, he will be only a character from photographs and stories. In the end, whether in writing or in memory, only the story remains. terp
Halina Peabody’s family surrounded her baby carriage for a photo (left), and she later played as a child before the war (below, left) before escaping with her parents and sister.
At bottom, Peter Gorog’s father, Arpad, declared dead in Ukraine in 1943, looks at the son who would retain no memory of him. As far back as I can remember, every time I was in a difficult situation, in physical pain or emotional distress, in seemingly hopeless situations, I conjured up an image. It was an image I had never seen, but it was more real than anything you can imagine implemented in a high-definition, 3-D movie. In this scene, I see my father walking in knee-high snow in the endless Ukrainian steppe, in his worn-out civilian shoes, wearing clothes that were not meant for the brutal Russian winter, hungry and fearful that he would be shot if he stopped for a little rest. At that moment, all of my pains dissipate, my hopelessness turns into vision, and my disappointments become negligible. I realize the sad truth—that he never had a chance to pursue his dreams, that he was half my age when he was robbed of the opportunity to see me growing up and to have fun with his grandchildren.
This imaginary scene gives me hope and strength when all else fails. In spite of the tragedy that robbed me of a normal childhood and took my father away, I am thankful for the memory of my father’s unfinished life.
—Peter Gorog
