The Market's Pop-Up Pantry initiative addresses food insecurity on campus

As my role as a board of visit representative, I had to set pillows for myself to have like a guide throughout my term. So one thing that I did was I set the drawing board the summer before my term began, July 1. And one thing that was on every single list that I created was food insecurity. So one thing I wanted to do was have a tangible effect or representation, the end of my term that allowed me to do this project with all of our students involved. This space is the lab space or VTDITC, Hip Hop Studies at Virginia Tech. It's a recording studio full of a whole bunch of equipment that we try to remove barriers to entry so anybody can come and use it, not just students but also community members. You know, it's a serious issue here at Virginia Tech and just wanted to support the great work T engage was doing. The mission of the Undergraduate Student Senate is to promote support and improve the undergraduate student experience at Virginia Tech through the spirit of Ut Pros. It was a lot of discussion, we got up in front of the Senate and we talked about the issue and really just explained kind of student to student. There are people in our community that are facing hardship that we can support right now by voting to approve this resolution to allocate money to the pantry. And from there, we allocated, I think it was about six or $7,000 to then go to buying the groceries and buying all the shelving needed for the pantry project. So there are students who are on campus for 12 to 14 hours a day at times. And finding a meal in there if you don't have the money to eat on campus is very, very difficult. We were initially approached by undergraduate student senate, and they had hopes of starting some sort of on campus food pantry. That is more of a walk in model versus the markets enrollment model. What was really cool about this was the idea to do a one month pop up that would last through the end of the semester. When students are potentially running out of swipes. We know this is a really stressful time of year for students. So to us, this was the ideal time to do a one month trial run. So during the four weeks that the program ran, we were open for a total of 64 hours and we had open pick ups during four days of the week. So this space was open to any student, Avergantech. We had a need base model, so take what you need. We provided over 3,000 food items to the students who utilize the space. During that time, we had a total of 130 different students use the space. And we had a total of 200 student visits during the month that we were open. During that time, we were staffed by volunteers, most of which were provided by USS. And we had a total of 15 students volunteer in the pantry during those four weeks. Because this laid the foundation for us to know what student use might look like. Moving forward for an on campus pantry, our next steps are to explore what it looks like to do something permanent on campus in a central location. But at a bare minimum, we hope to continue doing a pop up pantry somewhere on campus for the last month of semester to really support our students during some of the most stressful times of the year.

impact 3:07 The Market's Pop-Up Pantry initiative addresses food insecurity on campus

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23 Oct 2023 603

When the semester is winding down, and students are preparing for final exams, food security is more important than ever. The team behind The Market at Virginia Tech has created the Pop-Up Pantry to keep students fed during this crucial time.