Amrah Canul | Argonuat
Student staff Emily Johns organizes canned food at the Campus Recreation Food Drive. Community members brought non-perishable food items Nov. 17-25 to the Student Recreation Center which will be contributed to the Student Union Building food bank.
Almost half of all University of Idaho undergraduate students qualify for Pell Grants, putting UI in the top quarter of public institutions that enroll low-income students, said Bruce Mann, ASUI Center for Volunteerism and Social Action coordinator.
Although this doesn’t represent the number of students struggling with food security, he said it exemplifies a need on campus.
“This is a tough thing to measure,” Mann said. ” … Anecdotally, if you talk to the front-line offices that work with students, there are people that definitely have a need.”
To alleviate this need, the Center for Volunteerism and Social Action will install a food pantry near the kitchen in the Student Union Building.
There are two types of food pantries, Mann said.
The Trinity Moscow Food Pantry is set up similar to a convenience store. Due to the space allotted in the SUB, Mann said UI’s pantry will instead provide pre-packaged options.
“For instance, there will be items for a family of four, or a single student or a household of two,” Mann said.
Tables will be set up in the SUB for students to pick up food during distribution hours.
Mann said the project is a collaborative effort between several departments on campus — including Student Support Services, Idaho Commons and Union and Campus Dining, among others — that has been in the works for more than a year.
At the time, Mann said other universities around the country were putting food pantries on their campuses, so project organizers started to explore UI’s situation, whether there was a need and what it would take to make the pantry happen.
Maggy Hand, a UI junior who works in the volunteer center, played a large role in the planning and implementation of the project.
Hand said the Trinity Moscow Food Pantry helped her develop ways to successfully run UI’s pantry.
“They really just took me under their wing,” she said.
Hand said the UI pantry is modeled mostly after Oregon schools, but the forms and food organization are based on Trinity’s. She said the director of Trinity’s food pantry also established guidelines to help UI collect enough food.
Mann said the project has taken a while due to risk issues that had to be approved, but university administration has been supportive from the top down.
“Everything we do on campus, we have to be aware of risk,” Mann said. “We’re working with food, we wanted to be sensitive to the community as well … We had to find space, figure out how it was going to be sustainable and establish a step-by-step plan.”
The technicalities are not set in stone, but Mann said the pantry is set to tentatively open the third week of January and will have distribution hours two days a week, each with an afternoon and evening shift.
The volunteer center will run the operations, from managing deliveries and distribution to sorting food, Mann said.
He said UI’s pantry is primarily for students and members of the university, but Moscow citizens won’t be turned away.
“If somebody were to come in from the community and have a need, we would serve them but would also give them information on other food banks in the area,” Mann said.
Anybody can donate food, which should be dropped off in the Center for Volunteerism and Social Action.
Mann said drop-off points will also be established along the way.
UI students or living groups looking to volunteer should contact the volunteer center, Hand said.
Mann said the goal is to make the pantry as convenient as possible, and to lessen the burden on other food banks in the area.
“If we can do anything to relieve students of food security stress, we need to be doing that,” Mann said.
Britt Kiser can be reached at [email protected]