At Missouri State University, in the Plaster Student Union, is the Bear Pantry. It’s a food bank for students, staff and faculty: You can find canned vegetables and fresh produce from Ozarks Food Harvest, a couple of hydroponic setups from the Ag Department and eggs – a lot of eggs – from Vital Farms. There are hygiene products, period products and even a selection of greeting cards.
What really stands out is how conspicuous the space is; the Pantry is right by the Starbucks on the bottom floor, so if you’re entering from that floor, you’re going to walk past it, maybe every day. It sort of blends into the environment, which is important because a lot of people use the Bear Pantry. Last year they served more than 1,400 households and clocked about 10,000 visits. Those numbers go up every year.
The Pantry is a project of the Center for Community Engagement whose offices are next door. KSMU got the chance to sit down with CCE director Alex Johnson as well as graduate student Natalie Barbieri who helps run the pantry. What follows are some excerpts from those conversations.
Alex Johnson: So, the The Bear Pantry opened its doors in spring of 2019. As part of the center for Community Engagement, I get to work a lot with students who are developing projects identifying gaps in resources that there might be in the community. A graduate student in social work was working on a project to help identify how students at our institution might be facing food insecurity, so I got to work alongside that student to look at national studies and rates of food insecurity at four year institutions.
That was in the fall of 2018. We were seeing at that time that close to 36% of students at four year institutions were facing food insecurity or didn't have consistent access to healthy foods.
Pre-Bear Pantry, we had a connection with a local food pantry that was accessible for students, but we were hearing anecdotally from students that "hey, I'm facing food insecurity, but I might not feel comfortable going off campus to this other place that might not have been built for me." So we opened up an office in this space, about 60 square feet, with a couple of wire shelves and shelf stable food items to kind of prove the concept. That first spring of the Bear Pantry, we had about 75 students come in and utilize the space. Administration and donors and community partners were then really supportive of helping us to develop something bigger.
In spring of 2020 the library here on campus allowed us to utilize one of their study rooms because [the building] where we were had closed down. And so we adopted a contactless online ordering system. Residence life and housing allowed us to use one of their study rooms a little later on.
It was a tight fit. It was a person and a bunch of canned goods surrounding them for a little bit. Folks would place their order online, send me an email when they arrived and then we'd bring out their order to them.
Natalie Barbieri: The Bear Pantry used to have a partnership with AmeriCorps that supplied the Bear Pantry with, I think, around eight student workers. They could volunteer their time consistently with the pantry and get compensated for that. So, it was a really great partnership, and we no longer have that.
[Since then] we've been relying on volunteers quite a bit. Part of my responsibility is training those volunteers and making sure they know what they're doing in the pantry – around 35 to 40 volunteers a week.
[For context, Americorps was one of the federal agencies targeted by the Trump administration’s sweeping budget cuts last spring. They ended about $400 million in grants out of a budget that was at the time about a billion. Johnson confirmed for KSMU that The Bear Pantry was receiving one of those grants.]
Johnson: What we were seeing in the literature was that students can associate negative stigma to utilizing something like a food pantry. So, by "client choice [model]," I mean that we we want to respect the dignity of folks who are coming in to utilize the pantry to make food decisions based on their own dietary needs, family size or preferences. Instead of prebagging items or prepackaging items and potentially assuming what people might want to eat, we open up the space and let them take what they will need and will eat. It also helps us to reduce food waste as well.
Barbieri: One thing that is surprising to some people is that like all students come to use the pantry. There is no one type of person that comes to use the pantry. So many people come and utilize it because they need it, and they rely on it every week.
Johnson: When students provide their feedback, we get really positive reviews about students who have come on kind of episodic hard times. Whether their car has broken down and that's an extra expense that they weren't expecting or if a scholarship is a little bit delayed in – those times is when we usually hear about students utilizing the pantry as a kind of gap filler.
Barbieri: A lot of people think of food insecurity as just not having access to food, period – like enough food. No, food insecurity is not having enough access to nutritious food on a regular basis. Like, you may have all the ramen you want to eat in the world, but that doesn't supply your body with everything that it needs.
Johnson: It's creating a more outward, campus-wide conversation about what food insecurity can look like.
Nick Burasco provided production support for this story.