Grits: A Publication for Community Nourishment

In 2014, Colorado College shut down its soup kitchen.

Myself and two dear friends, Ben Criswell, and Caitlin Canty, got together to figure out how we could keep feeding our neighbors while also working to nourish our community in other ways, too. We pitched our idea in a seed funding competition and won $13,500- a lot of money to three college students. We worked with the Collaborative for Community Engagement to bring this workshop/food kitchen/narrative-shifting publication to life.

Co-Founders of Grits Collective: Paige Clark, Ben Criswell, and Caitlin Canty

We started traveling to shelters of all kinds around Southern Colorado to talk to people about their lives, provide meals, and work together to change public perception around people experiencing houselessness, hunger, and extreme poverty. We began holding writing and arts workshops at these shelters, attended by people we’d already built relationships with and a growing number of new contributors, and turned the finished products into a quarterly publication.

Grits: a Publication for Community Nourishment, was distributed to tens of thousands of readers across Colorado and New Mexico for years. Every physical print edition is catalogued in the Colorado College Tutt Library so that scholars writing about the issues faced by vulnerable populations will have those stories straight from the mouths and hands of people with lived experience. It was an honor and a privilege to bring this dream to life.