Description
The Store supplies students in need with free non-perishable food, personal and household items. We partner with on and off campus community volunteers and the Freestore Foodbank who provide their time, item donations, and monetary resources.
How You Can Help
The Store has been on Xavier's campus since 2017. This student-run food pantry was the recipient of a Women of Excellence grant requested by the Student Government Association after multiple campus-wide surveys uncovered a percentage of Xavier students have experienced a food insecurity problem. As a utilized resource on our campus for the past three years, we hope to update the look and feel of The Store so that we may provide for even more students on Xavier's campus.
These are some things that would make The Store more accessible and welcoming to our students.
A Card Swipe Capable Door and System — $5,000. Currently, the store is only open on Friday afternoons from 3-5 p.m. due to lack of personnel and resources needed to keep it open throughout the week. By adding the card swipe machine to the front door, students in need would be able to request access to the store any time they needed it by simply swiping their Xavier All Card.
Matching Shelving — a gift of $100 would purchase one shelving unit for The Store. We stock things like peanut butter, canned vegetables, pasta and sauce, snack bars, school supplies, toiletries and feminine products.
Deep Freezer — $700. Right now our fresh food options are limited to what we can fit in a small freezer. With a deep freezer we could always keep nutritious options in stock for our students without worry of it spoiling or running low.
About 80 students have consistently used the store since it first opened in May 2017.
A Message From A Xavier Senior
"Each semester until now as a senior, eating has been a choice sitting snugly between my loose wallet and my how much strain on my health I could bear alongside comments from family like “Oh, you’ve gotten so thin!” I love to eat. Cooking makes me happy. Variety keeps me excited. The store not only helps me choose my health over my dollar by offering free resources, but also encourages me to expand my culinary tastes with ingredients I normally would leave on the shelf for a cheaper and safer option. The Store gives me something fundamental to success, it gives me back my health and joy in cooking." - A Xavier Senior
Why Xavier Has A Food Pantry
In the fall semester of 2016, students in a sociological research methods course, under the direction of Dr. Kandi Stinson and in partnership with Student Affairs, conducted a survey of Xavier undergraduates who were living off-campus or in on-campus apartments.
The survey included 10 questions used by the USDA to measure the incidence of food insecurity. A total of 898 students (31.3% response rate) responded to the online survey. Overall, 23.6% of respondents demonstrated some degree of food insecurity. The same survey was repeated in fall of 2018 and 37% of respondents demonstrated some degree of food insecurity.
In response to these results in 2016, a small pilot food pantry (The Store) was opened in The Village apartments in May of 2017.