{"id":50064,"date":"2019-11-01T14:24:00","date_gmt":"2019-11-01T19:24:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sites.austincc.edu\/newsroom\/?p=50064"},"modified":"2024-11-13T14:27:02","modified_gmt":"2024-11-13T19:27:02","slug":"many-college-students-dont-have-regular-access-to-food-heres-how-universities-are-trying-to-help","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sites.austincc.edu\/newsroom\/2019\/11\/01\/many-college-students-dont-have-regular-access-to-food-heres-how-universities-are-trying-to-help\/","title":{"rendered":"Many college students don\u2019t have regular access to food. Here\u2019s how universities are trying to help."},"content":{"rendered":"

Austin American-Statesman: Many college students don\u2019t have regular access to food. Here\u2019s how universities are trying to help.<\/a><\/p>\n

By Lara Korte<\/a><\/p>\n

\n

Despite a wet cold front that blew in overnight, the crowd of college students began forming outside an hour before sunrise Friday morning.<\/p>\n

At Austin Community College\u2019s Riverside campus, the students lined up with bags or wagons, hoping for a chance to fill them with cans of beans, rice, pasta, fresh meat, vegetables and fruit offered by the Central Texas Food Bank.<\/p>\n

For many of them, this is their only chance to get groceries for the month.<\/p>\n

\u201cI pretty much only eat the food they give me here,\u201d said Gabriel Parker, a 20-year-old welding student. \u201cIn Austin, rent\u2019s a lot. We\u2019re in one of the cheapest places, and I still need some more help.\u201d<\/p>\n

Parker, like hundreds of other college students in Austin, struggles to maintain regular access to food. Food insecurity at universities is a growing problem across the nation, but especially in this city, where rent and cost of living have skyrocketed in recent years. As the problem becomes more apparent, many universities are working to fill in the gaps for their students, who sometimes go days without a meal.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s honestly our responsibility,\u201d said Kelly Brown, an ACC student life supervisor. \u201cBecause you can\u2019t just look at the student and only think about the academics.\u201d<\/p>\n

In 2017, a survey of ACC students found nearly 34% were food-insecure. A recent national survey\u00a0<\/a>put that number higher, between 40% and 48%. Although food pantries had existed in some spaces across the school, ACC wanted to do more, Brown said.<\/p>\n

Since then, the school has opened a food pantry at every student life office across about a dozen campuses. Pantries are filled with nonperishables, such as cans of beans, boxes of macaroni and cheese, and jars of peanut butter.<\/p>\n

Students can drop by the pantry at any time, but once a month they have the opportunity to get fresh produce, meat and dairy items from the Central Texas Food Bank\u2019s mobile distribution center. The donation runs from 9 a.m. to noon. By the end of it, workers have handed out more than 16,000 pounds of groceries to nearly 350 students.<\/p>\n

\u201cNot everybody has the advantage of getting free food,\u201d said Julie Salinas, an 18-year-old nursing student. \u201cIt\u2019s beneficial for a lot of people, and for me too.\u201d<\/p>\n

Elizabeth Pe\u00f1a, director of agency services at the Central Texas Food Bank, said the agency has seen the need among college students grow in recent years and has begun to target university populations. Several schools have reached out to the food bank, looking for ways to partner with the agency and supplement their own campus pantries.<\/p>\n

\u201cSometimes we don\u2019t think about food insecurity among college students; we just look at academics,\u201d ACC\u2019s Brown said. \u201cBut if a student doesn\u2019t eat, they\u2019re going to be struggling through class; they\u2019re going to be hungry, so they can\u2019t concentrate. It really does have a domino effect.\u201d<\/p>\n

But it\u2019s not just about having access to food. For many students, there\u2019s a stigma. Last year, Marcus Delzell, a junior at St. Edward\u2019s University in Austin, said he went a total of 60 days without eating. At some points, he went 10 days in a row without a meal. He worked two jobs outside of class to cover his school and housing costs, but there just wasn\u2019t enough for food, he said.<\/p>\n

St. Edward\u2019s does have resources for students who find themselves in situations like Delzell\u2019s. A peer-to-peer meal plan service allows students to transfer up to $300 of meal plan credits to a classmate, and at the St. Ignatius Food Pantry, right around the corner from St. Edward\u2019s, students can get up to a month of free food.<\/p>\n

Still, Delzell said he couldn\u2019t bring himself to seek help.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt was out of complete stubbornness and humiliation,\u201d he said. \u201cI felt that something would need to be wrong with me, and the only thing that was wrong with me is that I\u2019m a student.\u201d<\/p>\n

Some universities have tried to mitigate this fear. At the University of Texas, the UT Outpost has built a space that\u2019s designed to make students feel welcome and dignified. In addition to a pantry, the organization has a career closet, where students can pick out professional work wear, free of cost. The space is painted bright blue and green, with yellow shopping baskets for browsing the shelves.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe wanted the space to feel like a regular store you would go into,\u201d said Will Ross, coordinator of UT Outpost.<\/p>\n

Nearly 24% of undergraduates at UT are food insecure, according to a recent study that surveyed students in 2014 and 2015. Thirty-seven percent of those who said they cut meal sizes or skipped eating entirely said they did so at least once a month.<\/p>\n

The goal of resources like UT Outpost, Ross said, is to let students know they\u2019re not alone, and that there are people willing to help.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat\u2019s scary is that students may not realize they\u2019re dealing with food insecurity and not knowing where resources are,\u201d he said. \u201cWe\u2019re a tool for your success. It\u2019s not \u2018Oh, poor you,\u2019 it\u2019s like, \u2018Let me support you.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Austin American-Statesman: Many college students don\u2019t have regular access to food. Here\u2019s how universities are trying to help. By Lara Korte Despite a wet cold front that blew in overnight, the crowd of college students began … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3930,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[10,12,13,15],"tags":[3120,3771,2503,1999],"class_list":["post-50064","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-acc-in-the-news","category-business-and-community","category-current-students","category-facstaff-news","tag-austin-american-statesman-2","tag-central-texas-food-bank","tag-food-insecurity","tag-student-support"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.austincc.edu\/newsroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50064","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.austincc.edu\/newsroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.austincc.edu\/newsroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.austincc.edu\/newsroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3930"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.austincc.edu\/newsroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=50064"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/sites.austincc.edu\/newsroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50064\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.austincc.edu\/newsroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=50064"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.austincc.edu\/newsroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=50064"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.austincc.edu\/newsroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=50064"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}