Pop-up pantry helps students in Northern Virginia

Today is the student food pop up pantry for graduate students in the Northern Virginia area. Our goal is to try to find a way to limit food insecurity for our students while they are currently enrolled in classes here at our extended campus. By having a pop up food pantry, which is a donation based only pantry, will help alleviate a little bit of the food insecurity issue. And I'm really thankful to Virginia Tech for, you know, holding this especially for international students because it's really so helpful. Another way to help with that is to also be able to provide literacy classes for students. Budget classes to learn how to shop on a budget. Also to learn how to make meals out of very few items. How to make one to two meals. Also to learn how to actually read food labels. It's really important to know how to read food labels because we want to make sure that they're consuming great nutrients versus bad things. And one thing we try to do differently this semester was actually have recipes located around in the room to give students an idea of the types of foods they can make with items that they select. We had a lot of people donate hats, scarves, gloves, boots, winter coats, winter apparel. Most of our volunteers are students. You know there's always something which we can offer to each other and volunteering is the best way to do that. The most important thing is to make sure that students feel comfortable and they're able to focus on their studies, right? And a lot of times if you don't have access to adequate food, then your studies go down. So we want to make sure that that's not an issue. So that's why we have this pantry. It's so good when you actually serve people and you know they have a smile on your face and you make people happy. And it's obviously a good offering that you can give to the community. The students are really grateful for the graduate school along with the black caucus being able to provide this pop up pantry for them.