College campuses might not seem like places where food insecurity is a problem, but it is.
Witness the creation of food pantries at the University of Arkansas and at Northwest Arkansas Community College as evidence enough. But they aren’t the only ones to take the step to help hungry students and staff. Other campuses have done so, too, in Arkansas and elsewhere. A newspaper article published over the holidays focused on the pantry at Northwest Arkansas Community College, which was initially stocked from a $1,000 grant from the Northwest Arkansas Food Bank. Donations have kept the campus pantry stocked well enough for it to hold two distributions a month since September. To qualify, any student or employee of the college just fills out a request form.
“If you’re going to come to us and say you need food, you need food,” explained Becky Hudson, director of student life at the Bentonville-based college.
She told of an experience from last year that illustrates the need.
She was talking with a student in her office when the student noticed a sandwich on her desk and asked if he could have it.
“He said he hadn’t eaten in a couple of days.” Put yourself in that student’s shoes and imagine how difficult it must have been to ask for that sandwich, to acknowledge the situation. He wouldn’t be the first to have to prioritize where his money goes, especially in the case of nontraditional students who often are trying to get an education while supporting families and working low-wage jobs.
Education is the route to a better life and doing without food, or at least making do with less, is one of the prices some people pay to get it. The pantry at Northwest Arkansas Community College has had a modest start, serving fewer than 100 people since it began late last year. Hudson estimates 80 percent have been students and that they tend to come for each distribution.
What the pantry supplies on these twice-amonth distributions is enough food for three meals a day for three days for applicants and everyone in their household.
It won’t sustain them for long but can help extend whatever resources a family has.
The University of Arkansas’ campus pantry has been around since February 2011 and serves more than 300 people each week, about half of whom are students. The others are staff members.
All anyone needs to participate in the UA program is a university identification card.
The program also teaches the participating students about managing a pantry, taking in the tens of thousands of pounds of donated food and coordinating the volunteers who help staff the pantry.
And, of course, it is getting food to hundreds of hungry people each week who happen to be students or staff on a college campus.
Even those numbers are small compared to the ongoing work of the Northwest Arkansas Food Bank, which serves people throughout the region and in all walks of life.
The Food Bank is a distribution source for food pantries, senior centers, human service agencies, shelters and other nonprofits. It serves more than 750,000 clients each year in four counties (Benton, Carroll, Madison and Washington).
The food needs of people aren’t always obvious, but some statistics from the Food Bank explain why it exists and has since 1988.
Although most of the stats are a bit out of date, the 2000 Census showed that 10.10 percent of the total population in Benton County lives below the poverty level. The percentage in Washington County is almost double that, or 19.9 percent. Madison and Carroll counties fall in between, at 18.6 percent and 15.5 percent.
The need for the Food Bank — and for all the agencies it serves — gets greater each year.
The continuing growth of the region’s population, approaching 30 percent of the entire state population, is why.
Apply those percentages of people living in poverty to the growing population and the demand for food assistance just gets bigger.
It really doesn’t matter whether the help comes from a campus pantry or one of the many other agencies the Food Bank supplies, said Carrie Harlow, director of development at the Food Bank.
“We’re here to feed hungry people, and whether we do it through a senior center or a school, it’s pretty much all the same.”
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Brenda Blagg is a freelance columnist and longtime journalist in Northwest Arkansas. Email her at [email protected] .