By Jessica Wind (The Cascade) – Email
Print Edition: March 20, 2013
After receiving funding to serve breakfast to students on the Chilliwack campus, the University Christian Ministries (UCM) club failed to fry up one morning.
UCM serves free pancake breakfasts to students every Thursday morning in U-House, and the student group set out to offer a similar service at Canada Education Park campus (CEP) in the fall 2012 semester.
“The hope was to do it every week,” UCM president Derrick Uittenbosch explained. “We’ve done about four of them now and then just missed this last one a couple of weeks ago.”
When they originally applied for funding to the SUS board, they had as many as six volunteers lined up to serve bacon and pancakes. By January many of those volunteers were no longer available.
“They just kind of dropped out,” he said. “Schedules got changed.”
Uittenbosch didn’t blame the missed breakfast on low volunteer numbers, but instead took full responsibility.
“That was completely my fault,” he explained. “I was on the island during spring break … I came back, [it] completely slipped my mind and so the rest of the team didn’t show up in Chilliwack.”
Fortunately for the hungry students, members of Student Life and SUS stepped in when they realized that UCM wasn’t going to show.
VP social Chris Doyle said that it was the second breakfast missed by UCM.
“There have been two breakfasts at this time where they have said, ‘This is going to be a UCM pancake breakfast,’ and then they weren’t able to show up,” he noted.
After the second missed event, Doyle said SUS contacted UCM to plan out a schedule that would allow the breakfasts to go ahead as planned.
“We’ve talked to them; we’ve decided on specific days they can do it and they are planning to run those days,” Doyle said.
Uittenbosch confirmed that they will be closing out the semester with two more breakfasts at CEP, one in March and another in April.
UCM was originally granted $600 for the breakfasts in the fall.
“Until Tuesday, all $600 was still in the bank account, it hadn’t been used yet because we didn’t have the people to do it so we hadn’t gotten any of the supplies,” Uittenbosch explained. “We’ve just actually bought those supplies a couple of days ago. We’re just getting the last couple of griddles from Costco today.”
Doyle assured that future decisions to fund UCM wouldn’t be affected by the club’s rocky start to Chilliwack pancake breakfasts.
“So as long as they’re being responsible with the funding we give them, it should in no way affect what we do in the future other than make sure that we have constant communication with them,” he explained. “[SUS will] make sure that they can still manage their events and they don’t need any extra help.”
After the delay to get the griddles sizzling in Chilliwack, Uittenbosch admitted that his original plan wasn’t realistic.
“We haven’t been able to jump into that plan as quickly as we’d been anticipating,” he said. “It’s just a bit of a delayed timeline.We may have been a bit ambitious last semester.”
Despite the delay, Doyle is positive about the future of UCM’s Chilliwack pancake breakfasts.
“I’m just very hopeful that they’re able to manage the events that they’ve set out for the rest of the semester and then next year being able to do the same thing they do in Chilliwack that they do in Abbotsford,” he said. “If they do, they are honestly going to be one of our best community building groups and events that UFV has.”
Uittenbosch said that they have doubled their supplies with the funding from SUS, eliminating the need to transport between the campuses. He has begun speaking with other Chilliwack students that are interested in helping and is working out a strategy to make the UCM pancake breakfasts a success in the fall 2013 semester.
