\u201cThis is 100 percent needed,\u201d the communications major from Westport says. \u201cMany students go to school full time, then go to a full-time job just to support themselves and their families. Food insecurity is more prevalent now and it\u2019s growing.\u201d<\/p>\n
The pop-up pantry<\/a> \u2013 open Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. \u2013 is a hands-on project in associate professor-in-residence Laura Bunyan\u2019s Sociology of Food class that came about at the suggestion of colleagues and after talking with organizers of a pantry at Norwalk Community College.<\/p>\n It operates in a temporary space not far from the UConn Stamford welcome center on the first floor, in a room used by caterers in pre-pandemic times when more events were being held on campus, Bunyan says. With counters, shelving, and refrigeration it\u2019s ideal.<\/p>\n \u201cWe are working with the campus to provide a permanent space,\u201d Bunyan says. \u201cMy students are broken into groups that focus on different components of the project, and I\u2019m constantly asking them, \u2018What happens next? You have to think beyond the semester.\u2019 That\u2019s where they are right now, trying to figure out what\u2019s next.\u201d<\/p>\n Ideally, that would be the hire of a full-time, Stamford-based wellness coordinator who could do the operational work Bunyan has been doing in between teaching classes: shopping for food, fundraising, accepting donations, creating grocery lists, developing policies, arranging for student staffing, updating an Amazon wish list, and more.<\/p>\n \u201cThis is beyond my area of expertise,\u201d says Bunyan, who works in the sociology department<\/a> in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences<\/a>.<\/p>\n But for a pop-up project, it\u2019s begun to make a dent in the problem of college food insecurity.<\/p>\n All students can take advantage of the two-snacks-per-day allowance and can take up to five large items, like boxes of cereal and shelf-stable milk, per week, Bunyan says. She tries to stock the pantry with things like bananas and apples, granola bars, string cheese, yogurt, and ramen noodle cups for snack foods to give students a quick bite between classes.<\/p>\n Food Rescue US<\/a>, a nonprofit that works with businesses to collect unsold or unused food that\u2019s likely to be discarded, connected the pantry with Cobs Bread in Stamford, which donates its extra baked goods to charities. Along with Cobs focaccia, rolls, and pastries, the pantry also has benefitted from the reduced prices at the Food Bank of Lower Fairfield County, along with donations dropped in collection bins on campus and what faculty, staff, and external donors have offered.<\/p>\n By allowing all students to visit, Bunyan says the goal is to reduce the stigma of food insecurity because friends can stop in together, encouraging more to take advantage without having to disclose private information. And each day it\u2019s open, the pantry has been drawing an average of 50 students over the three hours.<\/p>\n Last fall, Bunyan says she had one student who had to return a rented textbook before the end of the semester because they couldn\u2019t afford to keep it any longer: \u201cKeep in mind, these books are about $20 online. This is a big problem that we\u2019ve long known. If you don\u2019t have $20 for a textbook, you don\u2019t have money to buy food.\u201d<\/p>\n Another student, someone Bunyan says she never met, emailed at the start of this semester asking when the pantry would open. She replied that it hadn\u2019t yet but offered what items she had available if the need was urgent. After the opening, Bunyan says she reached out and the student is reciprocating by volunteering.<\/p>\n \u201cProfessors are seeing more students coming to college with more needs and the challenge is helping them be successful while they\u2019re at UConn and beyond,\u201d Bunyan says, noting over the years she\u2019s bought lunch for students, offered granola bars, even once made a lasagna. \u201cBut you can\u2019t do that with them all. There are too many. One lasagna is not going to cut it.\u201d<\/p>\n And one semester \u2013 the pantry will close at the end of the month but may open during exam week – isn\u2019t going to solve the problem, but it does help and has inspired.<\/p>\n \u201cI will continue to volunteer after this semester because I don\u2019t want to let it go,\u201d says Vartuli, who just picked a sociology minor based on the experience in Bunyan\u2019s class. \u201cI honestly didn\u2019t think I would be this involved. I thought I\u2019d take the class as another requirement and stay in the background. But then the more I volunteered, I was so surprised by how much I loved it. I didn\u2019t think a course on food would be this interesting. We dig deep into the different economic, political, and social factors of food.\u201d<\/p>\n Visit the UConn Stamford food pantry website<\/a> for details on how to make monetary donations<\/a> and how to purchase from its Amazon wish list<\/a>. Items purchased on Amazon are delivered directly to the food pantry.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" A class project that’s making a dent in the problem of hunger<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":160,"featured_media":161883,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_crdt_document":"","wds_primary_category":0,"wds_primary_series":0,"wds_primary_attribution":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2226,1715,2192,2431,2235,174,2234],"tags":[],"magazine-issues":[],"coauthors":[2368],"class_list":["post-184245","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-clas","category-community-impact","category-fairfield-county","category-sociology","category-today-homepage","category-uconn-stamford","category-university-life"],"pp_statuses_selecting_workflow":false,"pp_workflow_action":"current","pp_status_selection":"publish","acf":[],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-05-11 01:55:21","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/184245","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/users\/160"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=184245"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/184245\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":184438,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/184245\/revisions\/184438"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/media\/161883"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=184245"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=184245"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=184245"},{"taxonomy":"magazine-issue","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/magazine-issues?post=184245"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=184245"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"Students](\"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/04\/Pantry-3-225x300.jpg\")