PETOSKEY — To help students keep their minds on their studies, and not on their empty stomachs, North Central Michigan College will soon be opening a food pantry on its Petoskey campus.
“The Campus Cupboard is an initiative that has come out of the Student Services area here at North Central,” said Renee DeYoung, vice president of Student Affairs. “What our mission and our goal is, is to help our students be able to eat so that they can study. We have found in the past, different studies have shown that when students are hungry they don’t do very well in college.”
According to a study from the U.S. Government Accountability Office, as of September 2018, more than 650 colleges reported having a food pantry on campus. Additionally, millions of students who were potentially eligible for Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) were not receiving those benefits in 2016.
The Campus Cupboard at North Central is still in the formation phase. The goal is to have it up and running by midsemester.
“We have gone out and we work with (The Manna Food Project food bank), so we are in the process of buying food from Manna,” DeYoung said. “We had a drive here, the very first week we came back, for staff and faculty. We asked them to bring nonperishable items to one of our luncheons so that we could put that in the Campus Cupboard … We also have payroll deductions, some of our faculty and staff have chosen to have money taken out of their paycheck to donate to the Campus Cupboard so that we can use that money to buy food.”
In order to use the Campus Cupboard, one must be a student at North Central Michigan College. Users will be asked for their student ID, but there are no other qualifying factors to use the pantry. Students will then place an order via an online form.
“We’re going to have guidelines set up depending on how big your family is,” DeYoung said. “We’ll take those orders, we’ll fill the order and then we will take the food order and place it in our (Student and Community Resource Center) office, and that’s where the student will pick it up. The students aren’t really going to go into the Cupboard itself. We will have volunteers within our organization that fill the orders that come in through electronic orders.”
At the moment, the pantry has mainly nonperishable food items and toiletries, although DeYoung said they hope to branch out into perishable food items in the future.
“We have canned foods right now and toiletries. And depending on what’s donated to us depends on what we’re going to be able to give to our students,” she said. “If somebody wants to donate money, just to the Campus Cupboard and not through a payroll deduction, that’s also available online through our Foundation. Our Foundation is the one that will hold the money and then that goes into the Campus Cupboard fund and when we want to buy food, hopefully there will be money there for us to buy it.”
Items from the Campus Cupboard are intended to supplement other food sources for students and their families, not be their primary source for food.
“We’re not going to say that it’s going to be 100 percent healthy, per se,” DeYoung said. “We’ll have boxes of cereal, we have rice, we have beans. That’s all been donated. Cans of soup and toiletries. I went down and looked at it the other day and there’s diapers down there. There’s all kind of macaroni and cheese down there. Some of the boxed food and canned food, tuna, canned chicken, there’s a lot of those things down there to help students.”
The exact location of the pantry is confidential, as is the ordering process, so that students won’t feel judgment for using the service.
“We’re trying to make it very discreet, so that there’s not bags that says ‘North Central Campus Cupboard,’” DeYoung said. “We’re making it discreet, and that’s one thing that we found out from the other colleges is the more discreet you are the better off, because some students feel as if they don’t want to be caught at the pantry because of what people will think of them. So, we’re trying to make it discreet so people won’t know that they’ve gone to the pantry to get food.”
College officials said they have seen a need for a food pantry-type service on campus for the students.
“We’ve had students come in to Student Services already and ask if they could borrow some money so they could go upstairs because they don’t have any money to get any food,” DeYoung said. “We know that that is a need and it’s an ongoing need that you can see throughout the community. A lot of the community colleges in our state have a Campus Cupboard or a food pantry as well, so we’re not the only ones.”
College president David Roland Finley added that the college did extensive research to learn best practices for the new program.
“I’m really pleased with this initiative,” he said. “It addresses a definite need, one people don’t necessarily want to admit is the case, but it’s there. If we can help our students focus on the learning, that’s what we’re all about.”
The overall goal of the program is to support students who need the extra help, and to ensure the program is sustainable into the future.
“One of the big things is that we want to make sure this initiative is ongoing, that it doesn’t start and stop because we can’t sustain it. It’s an ongoing event that we want to be able to offer our students from year to year,” DeYoung said. “Our goal is to help feed them. Our goal is to sustain it so that we have this service for students starting this semester into the future, until there is no need. I don’t know if that’s ever going to happen.”
