EXCLUSIVE: Good call

“We had been mulling the idea of a food pantry,” Executive Director of Event Services Dustin Kilgour recalls.

So, in true Bobcat “can do” spirit, Kilgour’s unit, the Division of Student Affairs (DOSA), purchased pantry shelving, placed it on the second floor of Baker, and loaded it up with shelf-stable food.

The food disappeared quickly, so each of DOSA’s 13 departments committed to taking turns in stocking the pantry each month.

OHIO walks the walk

Vice President for Student Affairs Jason Pina joined OHIO knowing that Athens County is the poorest in Ohio. In fact, 33 percent of its residents are living in poverty.* “The public good part of public education was important to me,” Pina explained. He saw mitigating food insecurity on campus and in the region as a real need. The Division of Student Affairs’ Culinary Services has been answering that challenge alongside the Baker University Center Food Pantry:

• Jefferson Marketplace and Boyd and Nelson Markets, retail operations within the Culinary Services program, have food collection stations, where students turn their unused flex meals into non-perishable food donations. These items go to Good Works, Inc., which serves area homeless and, now, the Baker University Center Food Pantry. Since 2004, Bobcats have donated about 4,500 pounds of food annually through this effort.
• Culinary Services donates limited food items (such as pastries and French fries) to Athens Food Rescue, a nonprofit that distributes the items directly to those in need. In the 2016-17 academic year, Culinary Services donated over 9,000 pounds of food through this collaboration.
• Culinary Services is working on a system by which one student can donate a meal directly to another student via their meal plan.
• Jefferson Marketplace has been approved to serve as a federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, retailer. Both students and community members will be able to use their SNAP benefits when the program is implemented in January 2018.

“For the staff who commit to these types of projects, the sense I get is they have a deep love for Ohio University, and it’s tied to their own personal story to Ohio University,” Pina said. “(In Athens), you either are directly involved in the University or you’re one step removed. We all want the town and the University to succeed.”

Alumnus walks the walk

As a member of Student Senate, Tyler Daniels worked to get a student food pantry off the ground.

“When I found out that others had recently made the pantry a reality, I was unspeakably proud of them,” says Daniels, BSGS ’16 and a counterintelligence support specialist for the U.S. Army in Afghanistan. He keeps in touch with his Student Senate and DOSA contacts. When he learns that the Baker University Center Food Pantry supplies are getting low, he orders from Amazon Grocery, which delivers directly to campus.

“There are Bobcats in need,” Daniels says, recalling his friends and fellow alumni who worked two jobs in addition to meeting their academic obligations. “We need to help the younger students in any way we can…eventually no student’s going to go hungry.”

Read about OHIO’s Food Studies Theme elsewhere in this issue of ohiotoday.

*Data from the February 2017 Ohio Poverty Report, Ohio Development Services Agency, Research Office, a state affiliate of the U.S. Census Bureau

Feature photo by Sarah Holm, BSVC ’18