The Cavs Cave Campus Pantry helps Walsh University students who lack enough food to eat.
NORTH CANTON Shelves stocked with food fill what used to be a rarely used meeting room at Walsh University’s Saint Katharine Drexel House.
The roughly 12-foot-by-12-foot space is now the home of the Cavs Cave Campus Pantry, a student-run food pantry established to help students who lack enough food to eat. A ribbon cutting for the Cavs Cave was held Tuesday.
Drenda Collins, wife of new Walsh president Tim Collins, came up with the idea for the pantry after visiting another higher education institution that provided food for hungry students.
“When he said ‘yes’ to the job (as Walsh’s president), we adopted 2,700 new kids so I needed to find out if there were students hungry on campus,” Drenda Collins said.
Through discussions with faculty and staff, she learned there were students, particularly commuters, who were going without food and attending class hungry. The university, which has led community discussions on addressing hunger, plans to conduct a formal survey this spring to determine the food insecurity rate among Walsh students.
In the Stark County community, the food insecurity rate is 14.2 percent, according to the Akron-Canton Regional Food Bank.
Opening the pantry
Following Walsh’s mission of developing servant leaders, Collins turned to two freshmen to spearhead the pantry project. She tapped Tara Ebert, whom she had met during a visit to the campus and recognized as a student leader, and Mattison Davis, who was recommended by her professor and had expressed an interest in helping other students.
Collins gave them three weeks to stock the pantry and make it operational.
“I said from the beginning that I wanted it open in October,” Collins said. “Kids are hungry on campus and we need to address this right away.”
They decided to locate the pantry inside the Drexel House because that is the home of the university’s Campus Ministry department.
“This way they can administer to the whole student because we don’t know what’s causing this (need),” Collins said.
Both Ebert and Davis, both from the Akron area, say they didn’t realize hunger was an issue on campus until becoming involved in the project. They found the issue was most profound among commuter students, which represent roughly 20 percent of Walsh’s enrollment.
“It’s been very eye-opening,” said Ebert, who volunteered in high school with a program that provided food to children.
Davis, who is a commuter and doesn’t have a campus meal plan, said she realizes how hard it can be for her fellow commuters to access food, especially when they might not have the money to afford the on-campus dining options.
“I think it’s a really big need,” Davis said.
The two surveyed the university’s roughly 500 commuters to determine what foods they wanted and then held a food drive last Wednesday on World Hunger Day asking for the most requested items. They received 2,300 donated food items from 50 different donors, as well as $450 in financial donations that they hope to leverage for buying additional food in the future.
They plan to hold additional food drives and partner with community organizations to keep the pantry continually stocked.
The pantry, which will be staffed by students in the university’s work-study program, will be open from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. weekdays.
To access the food, students only need to show their Walsh identification card. They then are given a list of the foods available. They mark to indicate the up to 13 food and drink items they want. Options include single-serve meals, drinks, pasta, snacks, chips and canned foods. A student worker then fulfills the request. No questions are asked as to why they need the food, Ebert said.
"We’re trying to make students feel very welcome," Ebert said. "There’s no judgment here. This is just purely out of the generosity of our community."
Reach Kelli at 330-580-8339 or kelli.weir@cantonrep.com.
On Twitter: @kweirREP
