An increasing number of colleges and universities have been recognizing the problem of student hunger on their campus and are looking for ways to provide more than a quick fix for the issue. A Utah university is one that has been serving low income college students.
The Southern Utah University has this HOPE Pantry - which stands for Helping Our People Eat - that has been running and been addressing the student problem on hunger for years, according to Good4Utah.com. In fact, they have been serving people since 2002, and has not changed its no questions policy. It is one of the very first student-serving food pantries in the US, and this is the reason why many other colleges and universities have looked into SUU's food pantry as a model for their own.
Many students have expressed how thankful they were for the HOPE pantry, considering that they have a very tight budget in college, that at times, they can no longer even afford to go to the grocery store. Around 400 students every month receive help from SUU's pantry.
The success of HOPE pantry inspired many other schools to open their own. Just recently West Chester University opened their own school pantry this school year, as well as Rutgers-New Brunswick and Cabrini University, according to Philly.com. Montclair State University also opened one last April and Rowan University will be opening one too, next month. Meanwhile, Temple University and the College of New Jersey are exploring options and ideas about having their own.
Tori Nuccio, the assistant director of financial aid at West Chester said that there are always students who are in need. And the number of these students has increased after the recession together with the unstoppable increase in the college costs. It is just right that students somehow get the help they need from their own campus.
