On Wednesday, members of St. Bonaventure University’s Franciscan Center for Social Concern (FCSC), a program of University Ministries, had the official grand opening of their newest project: a food pantry.
Located in the McGinley-Carney Center for Franciscan Ministry’s room 114, the food pantry serves to provide food for students and employees that might otherwise not be able to afford groceries.
According to the College and University Food Bank Alliance, 30% of college students nationally struggle with food insecurity, with 56% of those being students who are working. This program is SBU’s way of responding to that need on campus.
“This has been a dream of all of ours for a year now,” said Alice Miller Nation, the director of FCSC. “We didn’t know that there were people in our community who didn’t have enough food until I became aware of it a year ago, and so we got that person some food for the weekend, and then last fall we set up a stock-gap food pantry in the kitchen. And, it worked, but we knew we could do better, and so, this is our doing better.”
Originally starting as a task force, student coordinators Grace Seeley, a junior finance and accounting double major, and Trevor North, a senior political science major and law and society and philosophy minor, began looking to see if there was a need for a food pantry on campus. Throughout this, they worked alongside Miller Nation, Br. Kevin Kriso, O.F.M., Fr. Francis DiSpigno, O.F.M., the Warming House, the Higher Education Opportunity Program and others, North said.
“So, we started as a task force to kind of realize is there a need for it because it’s a need around the nation,” North said. “It’s very needed around the nation, but for us, we just kind of needed to determine ‘is this a problem here?’ Then we talked, and we had some people say there is this need, they’ve been told by certain people in the community, so we kind of wanted to figure out, ‘alright, what can we do to help them?’ So that turned into actually forming the food pantry.”
Each person who goes into the pantry has to fill out a qualtrics.com survey, asking questions such as what meal plan one has and where he or she lives on campus, along with other information. Those who fill out this survey, however, do not have to put their names and may remain anonymous.
“We want to emphasize people being able to have this comfort in there,” North said. “We don’t want it to seem like a big deal that they are coming into the food pantry.”
What started as a drive for non-perishable foods, like soups and cans of vegetables, has grown, allowing for perishable foods to be accepted into the pantry. Currently, the perishable items come from the gardens at Mt. Iranaeus, but they hope to get in touch with other organizations to supply more food, North said.
“We’re taking fresh produce now, so we have perishable items along with non-perishable items, which is really big,” North said.
Even though they have had these advances already, they hope to grow the food-pantry program even more. One improvement, installing a freezer for frozen meals, will occur mid-October.
“We’re hoping to build more and more,” North said. “Once we are able to get the freezer, we’ll be able to have like freezer meals, where they can just take a meal and go.”
Drop-off boxes for non-perishable foods are located across campus in the McGinley-Carney Center, Hopkins Hall, the Quick Center for the Arts and the William E. and Ann L. Swan Business Center.
By Natalie Forster and John Pullano, Editor-in-Chief and Sports Editor
forstena17@bonaventure.edu and pullanjj@bonaventure.edu
