The 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 serves approximately 1,050 members of the UArizona community per week and distributes over 5,700 pounds of food 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. 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 while also sending money home to families or supporting dependents. Attending a higher education institution is key to social mobility, and having a degree will allow these students the opportunity at a better life for them and their families. In order to understand which students were experiencing food insecurity the most, we began taking demographics of the students that are using the Pantry 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.
Due to the uncertainty surrounding COVID-19, The Campus Pantry adapted our services 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 of 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. It is our mission to provide the University of Arizona Community with food staples that they otherwise would not have access to, including fresh and nutritious foods.
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. Due to COVID-19, many pantry users experienced job and income loss. 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.
The University of Arizona Campus Pantry will continue to stay open to the campus community through the Fall 2020 semester. Staff, volunteers and users are all required to wear masks while in the Campus Pantry. Additional cleaning and changes have been made to our space to allow for more social distancing and protecting the safety of our staff and users.
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. For more information about donations or our program, please visit our website at campuspantry.arizona.edu or email us at uofacampuspantry@gmail.com.
“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.”
“There is a sort of stigma around food insecurity. If people who had more opportunities coming into the University compared to mine, it's sort of hard to communicate that. It’s hard because they're like oh let's go to the grocery store like every week and let's spend a couple hundred dollars and I'm like that's a lot of money that I don't have. It becomes a lot more uncomfortable to talk about and say, ‘Hey I can't go with you you're spending a lot of money that I don't really have.’ I start to feel like I’m missing out on those social interactions and having to explain that to them.”
“Food insecurity affected me a lot in the first semester. I struggled to really have the energy to go to classes and just to do the normal basic things in life. I didn’t have enough nutrients in my life and couldn’t really study or work. It was hard to function because I was just hungry all the time while studying and it was really hard to focus. I also had to worry about if I'm gonna get enough food during the rest of the week. I’m thankful to the campus pantry because they distribute three times a week so I'm able to ensure that I get enough food and I'm able to focus on studying and not having to worry about how I'm going to budget my money since that should be my last concern in with all the responsibilities of a college student.”