ECC’s food pantry expands successfully
Food Pantry donation boxes can be found in every building around the campus.
Elgin Community College’s Spartan Food Pantry is now more extensive. It went from a small closet to a room spacious enough for students to enter, grab a basket and take their time when choosing their food from the shelves.
According to Rachel Sherman and Emilio Edemni, food pantry co-officers and Phi Theta Kappa members, officers from previous years had been trying to expand the food pantry for a long time, and it wasn’t until last year that PTK members finally started working on the proposal for this project as it was intended to be a better quality pantry.
“We wanted to move it forward and not just stay in the same little closet, so [we’d be able] to serve more people,” Sherman said.
Back on April 25 of this year, a meeting was held wherein PTK officers Erin Humpfer, Andrew Pratt, Christina Tenorio and Miguel San Juan, presented the proposal for expansion to ECC’s President David Sam, who later approved it.
“The expansion meets the space needs, gives the pantry greater visibility and allows Phi Theta Kappa to add more items that students had been requesting,” Sam said. “This will serve the students very well.”
Food Pantry’s room has now shelves full of different food.
This change has allowed the pantry to increase the amount of food and other products since it now also serves refrigerated items, which were absent before. Also, the number of students who take advantage of the pantry has increased along with volunteers. According to Sherman, more of PTK chairs come in every day to help volunteer and manage the pantry, and since the expansion, more students have shown interest in volunteering, so they expect that the numbers will likely increase in the future.
Jonathan Fonseca, a student at ECC, comes in regularly to take something from the pantry, and he has noticed that students attend even more because of the change in space.
“It is a brighter place,” Fonseca said. “It didn’t seem that there was much before in the closet, there might have been, but now you see a lot more.”
The purpose of the food pantry is to serve food and groceries to all students regardless of their economic position, and you, as a student, can also help by donating some items such as canned food, snacks and hygiene supplies. ECC has donation boxes around the campus where you can deposit the items you wish to donate.
You can visit the Food Pantry in room B175, from Monday to Wednesday 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. and Thursday 12 p.m. to 3 p.m.
I’m earning an Associate in Arts degree at ECC and later transferring to a 4-year university for Journalism. This is my second year here at ECC. I decided...
Luke Harmon • Oct 16, 2018 at 12:17 pm
It is really truly amazing on how far this pantry has grown in the past couple of years since it first was a idea back in the 2014-2015 year. During my time at ECC, I was also an officer of Phi Theta Kappa, and most of my time was devoted in helping run the Spartan Food Pantry. I believed I was helping make a impact to my fellow students who face that difficult financial choice to attend college, while sacrificing those funds for food. While I was in attendance of ECC and seeing the number of patrons using the pantry rise just really opened my eyes to the students around me and realized that there needed to be change.
During my time at ECC there was this stigma that only truly “desperate” people use the food pantry and we spent most of that year trying to break that stigma, This pantry is open to all ECC students who if they need to use it… use it! We were (and still are) grateful for all donations made to the pantry from the generous doners who supported us.
The pantry growing is a big step and was one that a lot of past officers and volunteers were dreaming of and seeing that happened really makes me happy and proud of the team and community who volunteered and put their effort in providing a much needed service to this college.