University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
IN-14: Food Bank

Food access options available on campus:
1. Housing sponsors a program on campus called “Everybody Eats”: https://housing.illinois.edu/Dining/About-Dining/Everybody%20Eats
- Bevier Café (College of ACES) uses a pay what you can approach to offer students a low cost/no cost meal on campus.
- University Housing provides soup and rice at two hotbox locations on campus for anyone who comes by.

2. The Food Assistance and Well-Being Program at the ARC Institutional Kitchen provides a shopping style pantry for students with food security concerns: https://campusrec.illinois.edu/food-assistance-and-well-being-program/

3. The Disability Resource Center in APH provides a list of campus and external support programs to assist students with food needs: https://www.disability.illinois.edu/campus-life/resources-food-insecurity.

4. The Office of Inclusion & Intercultural Relations provides free lunches throughout the week from noon to 1 pm, which is accompanied by a relevant OCII presentation/discussion: https://oiir.illinois.edu/events/lunch.

5. University Dining Services Offers free meals to employees with any shift worked: https://housing.illinois.edu/aboutus/staff-employment/jobs/dining.

6. The Office of the Dean of Students provides a wealth of information for students about food resources on their website including how to apply for SNAP support if qualified: https://odos.illinois.edu/community-of-care/resources/students/food-resources/

7. As per Megan Daily, Director of MFEST: The Metropolitan Food and Environmental Systems (MFEST) Student Association and Project 4 Less are two student groups that have made UIUC a part of the Food Recovery Network (https://www.foodrecoverynetwork.org/). Prior to their recent initiation, UIUC was not a member chapter that includes 185 campuses across the US. Here is a draft website that they are working on to describe their efforts (https://illinoismfstsa.wixsite.com/frnuiuc). Prior to the formation of the MFST Student Association, Project 4 Less was already taking unsold food from one of the dining halls and packaging it to deliver to local food banks. The two student groups would love to expand these efforts across more dining halls and expand programming to reduce, recycle, compost food and packaging waste.

Thoughts/Questions:
- With all of the resources one can find through the UIUC website there are ample support opportunities available to student to address food insecurity. Are students in need finding/accessing these resources? One student said, “Making this information available to students in a centralized way would be amazing”. Is it possible to gather this information in one place to make it easier for students to access? The dean of students site appears to this but are students accessing this information and then going to these sites to seek support?

- Do we have an accurate grasp of the level of food insecurity issues on campus? Several researchers in ACES and Illinois Extension (Prescott, Ellis, Gundersen, Nickols-Richardson, McCaffrey, etc.) work in this area. See https://mpp.fshn.illinois.edu/ as an example. Are we applying what we are learning through our research to the campus community?

- What does Dining Service do with the food left over from events or that isn’t eaten in dining halls? Are there opportunities to: a) utilize this prepared food to better address food insecurity issues on campus and in the community; b) reduce portion size estimations per attendee to reduce the amount of food waste generated at these events; and/or c) create a broad-based composting program on campus to address food waste issues? Note: The MFEST Student Association and Project 4 Less are making excellent efforts to address ‘a’.