The room is easy to miss. Down a service hallway in the basement of the student union, past a locked equipment closet and a bank of vending machines, a hand-lettered sign points toward a door that, twice a week, opens onto rows of canned vegetables, rice, pasta, and a small refrigerator of donated produce.

This is the campus food pantry, and for the past three years, it has been the only formal food-assistance resource available to the roughly 11,000 undergraduates on this campus.

From 40 students to 130 in three years

The pantry opened in 2023 as a project of a single student organization, run out of donated shelving with a volunteer staff of six. In its first semester, it served an average of 40 students a week, mostly through word of mouth.

By this spring, that number had more than tripled, according to sign-in logs reviewed by The Spotlight, to an average of 131 students a week — a figure current volunteers say likely undercounts actual need, since many students avoid signing in out of stigma.

We've had semesters where we ran out of everything but rice by week nine. That's not sustainable for an operation run by twelve unpaid students.Pantry co-coordinator, class of 2027

Why demand grew

Several factors appear to be driving the increase, according to interviews with pantry volunteers, financial aid staff, and 14 student users of the pantry, most of whom asked not to be named.

  • A 6 percent rise in off-campus rent near the university since 2024, which has pushed more students into housing farther from campus with less predictable meal access.
  • The mandatory meal plan structure, which several students said left them without funds by the final weeks of the semester.
  • Reduced hours at the two lowest-cost dining hall stations, cut in a 2025 budget adjustment.

A resource with no institutional backing

Unlike food pantries at several peer institutions, the university provides no direct funding, staffing, or dedicated space to the operation. Volunteers rent the storage room informally through the student union at a nominal fee and rely entirely on food drives, a partnership with a regional food bank, and out-of-pocket purchases by organizers.

A university spokesperson said the administration is "aware of and grateful for" the pantry's work and pointed to an existing emergency-grant fund students can apply to separately. Pantry volunteers said that fund has a two-week processing time that makes it ill-suited to addressing food needs day to day.

The university did not respond to a follow-up question asking whether it has considered providing direct funding or space to the pantry.