Faculty in the Bemidji School of Nursing have served a weekly “Feed and Seed” home-cooked meal to students in the four-year nursing program since January, 2015.

Initially serving between 10 and 30 students, the Feed and Seed meals now serve a healthy, well-balanced meal to between 50 and 60 students each week.

The Feed and Seed helps develop closer relationships between nursing students and faculty. The “seed” portion of the weekly meal encourages students to answer a nursing-related question, and participation in weekly activities makes students eligible for a grand prize drawing at the end of the semester.

Nursing faculty, supported by a Faculty Mini-Grant awarded by the Office of the President, are using the events to gather research on student wellness. Research results will be presented by Dr. Jeanine McDermott, assistant professor of nursing, and Drs. Sarah Tarutis and Carolyn Townsend, associate professors of nursing, at the 16th Biennial Society for the Advancement of Modeling and Role-Modeling National Conference, which will be held in San Antonio, Texas, in April 2016.

Students also voluntarily assess their own wellness using several dimensions, assess their level of stress, and share their grade-point average and their own thoughts on how well they have adapted to college. As part of their research project, faculty are looking for correlations between a student’s wellness and the number of times the student participates in the Feed and Seed.