Alumni
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Mac Muir
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Mac has worked with fellow Ingram Scholar Will McCollum on hunger issues in the Nashville area. His freshman year, he hosted a food drive to collect 1,600 pounds of food donated by Vanderbilt Students. Building on this success, Mac approached Camp Howard, director of Vanderbilt Dining, to work on developing a more sustainable program that allows students to donate one meal to Second Harvest Food Bank of Middle Tennessee in place of one side dish at Vanderbilt's dining hall. This program, called "Share-A-Side" has, to date, collected over 20,000 meals for the community. Capitalizing on the success of "Share-A-Side," Mac looked for opportunities to expand the core idea of local, community philanthropy outside the college environment. He teamed up with Sunset Grill to pilot "Never Eat Alone," a program that allows restaurant patrons to give someone else the chance to eat every time they do.
In his third year, Mac continued his work with Second Harvest. He worked under Melinda Judd by helping with Second Harvest’s cause related marketing programs. During this time, he also served occasionally with Open Table Nashville, which focuses on supporting Nashville’s unhoused community. In his spring semester, Mac studied abroad in Amman, Jordan. During that summer, Mac completed his Ingram Summer Project with Will McCollum in Guatemala. The project was a faculty fellowship under the supervision of Professors Ted Fischer and Bart Victor. The mission was to research small coffee farmers’ access to the micro lot coffee market with the goal of evaluating possible solutions to increase their market power and promote equity within the market.