Campus Food Pantries: A Component of Supportive Higher Education Campuses?

Background and Purpose: Bergman, Gross, Berry, and Shuck (2014) identified campus environmental factors (i.e., supportiveness of college campus) as significantly predictive of adult learners’ persistence to degree. Parnell (2017) identified strategies for “holistic student support,” and found, in a landscape analysis of emergency aid programs at 695 institutions of higher learning across the nation, that 45% of institutions with emergency aid programs reported the presence of a campus food pantry (CFP). This paper asks the question: Can CFP’s reasonably be assumed to be a component of a supportive campus?, and draws on the results of a survey and interview project conducted at a large Northeastern US university to suggest that the answer, preliminarily, is yes.

Methods: An electronic survey was designed to elicit the wants, needs, and preferences of the campus community regarding the university’s CFP, with the goal of surveying the entire campus to gain understanding of the perspectives of the larger campus community, as well as those of people who have been guests of the CFP. This survey and an invitation to participate were delivered to the ~48,000 faculty, staff, and student campus email addresses on two occasions, approximately two weeks apart, in December 2015. Valid survey responses (N = 822) were analyzed using quantitative and qualitative methods. Open-ended responses were coded to identify themes and patterns using the principles of grounded theory to assess thematic meaning. A convenience sample of respondents (N= 10) was identified through the survey and fliers posted at the CFP; in-person, semi-structured interviews were conducted to further elicit and explore perspectives and themes identified in survey responses.

Although this data is limited by its relatively small sample size, response rate, and use of self-report and non-probabilistic methods, the use of survey and interview methodology of this type allowed for the surfacing of the perspectives and experiences of those most affected by and motivated to comment on the issue, thus providing an important avenue for participant self-efficacy and agency.

Results: Qualitative responses overwhelmingly expressed gratitude and appreciation of the support provided by the CFP (i.e., help, “someone cares”) or viewed the CFP as worthy and deserving of support (i.e., desire to contribute financially, in kind, or by volunteering), while very few responses suggested opposition to the CFP (e.g., “get a job”, CFP as improper response vis à vis tuition amelioration).

Conclusions and Implications: Overall results lend support to the premise that CFP may be an important and useful short-term means by which campus administration can increase supportiveness of campus while working on longer-term fixes regarding tuition/cost of attendance, accessibility, and other barriers to student success and completion.

Further studies should identify those elements of campus support presumed to influence persistence to degree and specifically examine the intersection of food insecurity and college completion. Still unknown is how much is due to the alleviation of food insecurity, per se, rather than as a function of subjective feeling of support and other factors.