Creating a Campus Food Shelf by Brian Noy, Director, Campus Kitchen at Augsburg College As the costs of college put increasing pressure on students, poverty on campus is a growing issue. Having a food shelf (also sometimes call food bank or food pantry) on campus is one method for assisting students in need, and many campuses across the country are providing this as a service to students. Some of the advantages: Provides for the basic needs of students Having easy to consume items help students stay engaged during classes Can bring visibility to associated Campus Kitchen programs on campus Engages the campus community in giving, especially giving to students in need This document outlines the steps taken by the Campus Kitchen at Augsburg College and highlights some of the insights we have had through the experience. While every campus and implementation process is different, this outline should cover the project quite universally. The steps are listed somewhat sequentially, but ideally, many of the tasks are happen concurrently and by different representatives 1. Assess need 2. Form a leadership team 3. Secure space 4. Plan for food procurement 5. Form partnerships and Foster service learning 6. Make a schedule 7. Set the rules 8. Promote 1. Assess Need Every student body is going to have different needs. Attempting to measure what that need is will help inspire the organizing support of staff, faculty, and students, and running a substantial study will also help promote the service long before it begins. While there are many easy online tools for creating surveys and collecting data, this could also be a service learning project for a statistics or related class.
2. Form a Leadership Team A diverse body of leaders and advisors is vital to implementation. Having representatives from across campus will create connections to classes, food service, facilities, and other groups and offices on campus needed to create the food shelf. Augsburg formed a team of students, staff (including the Campus Kitchen coordinator), and faculty members that met each week. It took less than two months to finalize all the details and begin the operation. 3. Secure a Space Securing a space can be the one piece that makes the process take two weeks or two years depending on the local bureaucracy of the college. Fortunately for us, we were aware of a small kitchen space on campus that was only used on Sundays by a local congregation, and only needed permission from the pastor who controlled the space to make it work (with final approval coming from the Director of Facilities who listened to the pastor). Be sure to begin working with the Director of Facilities or other appropriate person early on so you can have a space lined up and approved by the right person before moving too far along in the process. The space that Augsburg chose was a small kitchenette that was located off of our campus chapel. It was ideal that the location of the chapel was well known by everyone on campus and had individuals regularly using the space, but it was discreetly tucked into the back of the space. We felt that it would work well for students who may not feel comfortable frequenting a food shelf. It was quite compact, but we only needed two small steel and NSF certified shelves and room for just a couple students at a time. The small size seemed to work extremely well. Depending on the local health codes, it may require some type of a food license. We framed the Augsburg food shelf as a pilot and chose to forgo working with the city until we knew the space worked well. Licenses can cost hundreds of dollars, and may require facilities such as
handwashing stations, nearby restrooms, NSF equipment, and other features. We also housed the program under Campus Kitchen, and informally under the food license we currently hold. If the city knew about the food shelf, they would probably require that we get a unique license for it, but as there was little risk with the non perishable foods we planned to offer, we chose to postpone that work. pantry at Baylor University pantry at UMass Boston (in a filing cabinet!) 4. Plan for Food Procurement Having a sustainable food supply that offers users a diverse set of options is crucial. Fortunately, we seemed to have little problem as many people who worked on and lived nearby the campus were excited to have something that was easy to give to and connected to our students. Most of the food came through these small, individual donations. To make food collection easy, we planned for a few drop points on campus: one each for the three dining\cafe spaces, one at the nearest office to the actual food shelf, and one at the welcome desk in the student center. The collection boxes at the dining spaces didn t seem well utilized and in the fall, we plan to use only the welcome desk as it s always well staffed, has some secure storage space, and the bins behind their desk don t end up collecting random debris like the unsupervised ones do. Besides collecting the small, random donations, we also utilized our membership with the large, local food bank to supplement the donations. Here, we were able to procure free or extremely inexpensive amounts of the most popular food items. Since we regularly went to the food bank to
procure food for our meals, it worked quite well to go each week to pick up food for both operations. The most popular items were the ready to eat options like granola bars and snack foods, followed by canned fruit and easy to prepare meals like macaroni and cheese. 5. Form Partnerships and Foster Service Learning This is the fun, creative part. We were surprised at the interest in the food shelf, and the different ways that groups wanted to contribute. Early on we met with the company that manages the dining center to see if they felt our free groceries would conflict with their business and they immediately wanted to support it by hosting our donation bins and offering discounts on coffee for those who donated (in reality, I am not sure this encouraged much actual giving). A student professional group set the whole food shelf. An art and design class did the initial survey and created an identity, logo, promotional material, and had a large art opening that sold the work to raise money for the food shelf. Logo designed by the Augsburg Fine Arts Keystone Class
6. Make a Schedule To be effective, the food shelf doesn t need to be open that many hours each week if the schedule is clear and offers diverse times for people to visit. We wanted it open at least three days a week, two hours at a time, and have morning, afternoon, and evening hours. From the beginning of the planning, we had about four committed students that wanted to run the open hours, and we set the schedule based on their availability. This was easier than having set hours that we had to find volunteers to staff. It was often brought up to incorporate short term volunteers into the operation as the Campus Kitchen normally does with the meal program. Because of the perceived sensitivity of students who use the service, we wanted a consistent group of individuals who ran the food shelf the entire semester. For each shift, we scheduled two of these students to avoid problems related to sick or absent students. This worked quite well. 7. Set the Rules Every food shelf needs to set their rules to ration their available resources. We borrowed our rules from a couple other Twin Cities college campuses. Any student is able to take up to five items (any kind) per day. They can return as many times as they would like. We recorded every visit and found that no one came more than once or twice a week. There is no good way to assess who is in need and who is not, so it was open to anyone who thought that they could use it. The rules were simple, apparently didn t allow for any abuse, and seemed to satisfy what people needed so we plan to keep them. In addition to the five items, we did keep a box of things that stayed around (like some strange condiment) that people could take without limit. This kept the shelves from cluttering up, and allowed for people to have more than usual. 8. Promote Promoting a service is always the most creative process. The following avenues were used to promote the food shelf: posters, some with business cards in a sleeve; the business cards (often carried by team members to hand out to friends or students); campus newspaper article; display screens across campus; the art opening that worked on promotional and artistic pieces for the food shelf; and information on the Augsburg and Campus Kitchen facebook pages (we chose to use Campus Kitchen as it already had a following rather than creating a separate group for the food shelf). As we changed the times to reflect the traffic that we didn t learn about until having it open for a couple of weeks, it was a bit unclear what the new times were, and some confusion as we had to create new times and promote them. It would have been valuable to do a little more research in the beginning, but it was still worth it to be flexible and adapt. When next semester begins, we
will stick with a schedule now that we know what works. When we started, we didn t bother to work hard to give it an identity. We left that part to the art class and knew that they would take the semester to investigate the food shelf and issues. They came up with the Campus Cupboard and logos to use. Business card is attached to various posters and in relevant offices to easily distribute and inform
Poster by the Augsburg Fine Arts Keystone Class Conclusion Our experience was everything that we could have hoped for. Donors were slightly more generous than expected, traffic was about what we hoped for, and everything from finding the space to creating posters was quite smooth. Our big change for the new semester would be to stay with a clear and consistent schedule, and promote it thoroughly. Questions can be directed towards Brian Noy at noy@augsburg.edu Other Resources So You Want to Start a Campus Food Pantry? A How To Manual. Sarah E. Cunningham and Dana M. Johnson. Oregon Food Bank 2011. http://oregonfoodbank.org/our Work/Partner With Us/New Agency Kit/~/media/Files/So%20You %20Want%20to%20Start%20a%20Campus%20Food%20Pantrypdf.pdf