The University of Arizona Campus Pantry
The Campus Pantry is a student-run organization that provides healthy food options in a "grocery store style" fashion for students, faculty, and staff who are considered food insecure at UArizona. The mission of the organization is to alleviate hunger in the Wildcat community by providing food assistance to those in need. Started by a graduate student in 2012, it began as a small food closet in a residence hall. The Pantry has now grown into a 3790 square foot space that served approximately 1,050 members of the UArizona community weekly and distributed over 5,700 pounds of food per week prior to the COVID-19 pandemic. During the height of the pandemic, we were the only fully operational program on campus and continually supported students through 620 visits per week.
As the program has grown, we have worked tirelessly to alter our program to best fit the needs of the 29% of food insecure students on our campus. Since the Campus Pantry is open to anyone on campus, we serve a unique and diverse population each week. We have discovered that 50% of our undergraduate users receive the Pell Grant, 31% of our users live on campus, 25% of our users are Hispanic and 30% of our users are international students. Many of the students who attend the Pantry come from low socioeconomic status backgrounds and are paying for their tuition, books, and housing on their own. Attending a higher education institution is key to social mobility and having a degree will allow these students the opportunity at a better life.
Due to the uncertainty surrounding COVID-19, The Campus Pantry adapted our services last year by staying open through the summer to continually support our users during these turbulent times. Through our time staying open, we had an increased need among our low-income students, faculty and staff users. This increase in need was often the result of job or income losses due to furloughs and reduced work hours. Additionally, there was an increase in the need for assistance from our international students, since many were not able to return to their home countries during the pandemic. These students had to remain on campus as campus dining closed and grocery stores experienced shortages.
Food insecurity amongst college students has several implications including poor diet, poor overall health, lower grades and decreased graduation rates (Dubick, Matthews, & Cady, 2016; Lee, 2018). In addition to the normal stress of being a full-time student, most students work a full or part time job in order to pay for their classes and living expenses. The instability of the workforce due to COVID-19 caused an increase in hunger and financial hardships making it even harder to make ends meet. It is a goal of the Campus Pantry to provide additional support for these impacted students by taking away the worry of paying for their next meal or preventing them from having to make choices between their education and food.
To better adapt to our growing number of users and the inclusion of the Campus Closet to our Basic Needs Center location, we began renovations of the space during the Summer of 2021. This construction project will allow for the best utilization of the space, reduce the stigma of accessing resources and provide more cold storage by building a walk-in refrigerator. If you want to support the renovation efforts of the Campus Pantry and Campus Closet, please email us at uofacampuspantry@gmail.com or visit the donate tab on our website: campuspantry.arizona.edu. The Campus Pantry would not be able to stay open and continue to serve students without the generous support of our campus and Tucson Community.
“The campus pantry is just good people doing good things for the good of the community, I appreciate them so much. They never question me when I come and they're always smiling and happy to see me every week. They always make sure that I feel like I belong in the UA community even though I may face food insecurity. They make me feel at home and without them I wouldn't be the student I am today.”