FOOD PANTRY

Before this assignment, I had no idea that our school had a dedicated food pantry system. After reading several articles about food pantries and their help around handfuls of schools, I was intrigued. Food pantries are a necessity in all schools especially ones in high priced cities. Many people can’t afford the food supplied on campus and especially can’t afford to eat anywhere else. If people don’t have food, some just choose not to eat. The tuition in almost every school is demanding and you have to choose between supplies or food. People can donate canned and dried goods to their school’s pantry and have them readily available for pick up from students, staff, and faculty. A pantry can only work when there are people willing to volunteer to donate food and work for the pantry.

Depending on the situation, I’ve realized we’re all here to better the community and environment we live in. Almost everyone has the community’s best interests at heart. With that being said, I feel like properly researching and valuing everyone’s opinions is something I’ve taken from service design to incorporate into my design work. It is very possible that when I’m working on something I end up missing a valuable piece that I hadn’t seen before. Or others bringing to the table different opinions I probably wouldn’t have been able to come up with on my own. I appreciate hearing ideas and welcome differing sides.

A question that immediately came to mind after reading these articles was how do you publicize food pantries to get the most that you can from the people in the school? After reading The New School Free Press article about the opening of a food pantry, I felt that there was some way to make sure this information reaches everyone that it can. I had never heard about the food pantry until now and it’s something I quickly became invested in. If there was some way to make sure this is known to everyone and how people can help, then this would be a great benefit for our school. Even reading about the gift cards from CVS and Trader Joe’s that our school has given out, I’m sure there are more people in need who could use the money and the food. If we can shed some more light onto this and show people that every can, every penny counts, then I feel like we could even make our food pantry system better by the semester.

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