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Guests admire the handmade bowls at the Empty Bowls event and choose one to take home.

Green River pottery students made 120 bowls to help the Enumclaw-Kiwanis food bank raise money for the hungry through their annual Empty Bowls event on March 1.

At Empty Bowls, guests give a cash donation for a simple meal of soup and bread; they then choose their own hand-made bowl to take home, to serve as their reminder of all the empty bowls in the world. Because of this memorandum, Empty Bowls raises awareness in the community that hunger is still a problem in our local and world communities.

More than 200 guests attended the event. They sat together at round tables in the Enumclaw High School commons, where the event was held. Bowls of all sizes sat neatly arranged on rows of folding tables. While the bowls were displayed so that guests could easily browse and choose their favorite, the overall effect was that of an art exhibit.

People milled up and down the aisles, some with their arms stacked with bowls as they struggled to decide which was most beautiful; most just reverently viewed and touched, enjoying the sight and feel of the shiny, hard bowls. There were more than 400 bowls in the display.

Empty Bowls is a no-expense event, which means that everything is donated. The clay the Green River students used was donated by two different organizations; artists gave some of their own original ceramic works to the cause. The Enumclaw Rotary and Kiwanis service organizations staffed the event, along with the Youth Center and Boy Scout Troop 422. Local restaurants donated soups and bread, and the high school cafeteria staff even donated their time and worked late on a Friday.

The Enumclaw and Kiwanis food banks together serve more than 8,500 families in the community and preliminary numbers show the event raised more than $5,000 for the food banks.