Curbing student homelessness: organizations offer support

Pitt officials told her the only thing they had to offer her was a short- term loan that had to be cleared before graduation.

“Obviously, that wasn’t going to work,” Chen said. “So, with all of this information, I thought I was going to become homeless. At the same time I had this pressure from my roommates to contribute,” Chen said.

When she eventually came clean about her circumstance to her roommates,  and something surprising happened. In November and December, they all joined together to pay her portion of the bill, but she was still financially struggling, causing her to suffer in the classroom.

In the days that followed, Chen tried to call her mom again to see how she was doing; but her mom had disappeared. It would be weeks before she found out her mother was alright.

During her personal chaos and increasing hunger, Chen found a haven to fall back on located in the basement of a church on her very own campus. This hopeful place was the Pitt Pantry.

Her first time using the pantry was a positive experience. While there are no fresh vegetables or other produce, she could get various dinners and bagels collected from local businesses.

“It’s not necessarily the healthiest, and it doesn’t have everything, but it’s better than having no food,” Chen said.

Chen thinks students rarely self identify because they may be scared or embarrassed to express their issue.

The Pitt Pantry was founded two years ago after a myriad of students qualifying as food- insecure came out and asked for support.

Chen thinks students rarely self-identify because they may be scared or embarrassed to express their issue.

“The students reported that there were times in their collegiate careers where they had not been able to purchase nutritious food, or when they had to cut back on eating meals in order to afford other bills,” Erika Ninos said, the sustainability program coordinator for PittServes.

Ninos has been working for the University of Pittsburgh since November of 2014 and plays an important role in preserving the success of the Pantry.

The Pantry is largely run by student volunteers, but is sustained primarily through financial support from the Division of Student Affairs. It is also supported through donations from students, staff, faculty and campus and community organizations. In addition to all of these resources, it creatively partnered up with the campus’s dining service.

“We have access to donated funds through Sodexo’s Dining Dollars donation program, in which students can donate unused Dining Dollars to us at the end of the semester,” Ninos said. “We are able to use this funding to purchase low cost food items through the Greater Pittsburgh Community Food Bank.”

Pitt has a consistent turnout of shoppers throughout the academic year, most of which are graduate students.

“During the fall 2016 semester thus far, we have seen 81 shoppers in August and 106 shoppers in September,” Ninos said.

The Pantry not only serves to students in the fall and spring semesters, but they also keep their doors open in the summer.

The Pitt Pantry also offers health and wellness workshops, Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) information, food sampling and recipe ideas, coupons and other related programming, like home winterization workshops to the students who walk through their doors.

“Our partners are the Bellefield Presbyterian Church, where we are located, Collegiate YMCA, 412 Food Rescue, Greater Pittsburgh Community Food Bank and the Food Rescue Heroes, a campus organization, and we have many other student organizations who partner with us to provide various levels of support,” Ninos said.

412 Food Rescue is fairly new, as it was officially up and running in March 2015. The organization works with food retailers like Giant Eagle, Whole Foods, Trader Joe’s and Bruegger’s Bagels to recover food and deliver it to their beneficiaries. They also get food from small local farms and restaurants as well as companies like Paragon, which operate by bringing bulk deliveries to large restaurants.

“We hope to be picking up and delivering for all of the schools in this region in the future,” says Hana Uman said, the program and special projects manager at 412 Food Rescue.

Uman is a passionate member of the rescue service who started working for the organization in February of 2016.

“I believe food is a right, not a privilege,” Uman said. “I think everyone has a right to eat, so in whatever capacity that I can through working at this organization, I will try to give people that.”

She worked in a program at a local Pittsburgh school where most of the children qualified for free and reduced lunch. Almost all of the food from the lunches had to get thrown out because it had been heated up for lunch and couldn’t be served again.

“That was really troubling to me that we were just throwing all of this food away and people may not have any when they get home,” Uman said.

Using her inspiration, she now deals with all of the special programs that work to reduce food waste they have layered on top of their main goal of delivering food to those in need.

At 412 Food Rescue, they work directly with the food service provider at any college or university. For Pitt, they partnered with the Food Recovery Heroes. This is an on campus organization that was doing food recovery already, but 412 worked with them to expand so that they were able to rescue food every day from their dining services and local Bruegger’s and then followed by delivering to one of 412’s sites.

At Chatham University, another partner of 412, students go to their food service provider and rescue any frozen food that’s left over. They also stop by at local grocery stores to rescue any of their food then donate it to a family high-rise in Hazelwood.

“More and more people are using the Pitt Pantry, and I’ve heard other schools are looking into this as well because they’re seeing that there is definitely a need,”  Uman said.

While these services are still developing, students have yet to be shown the same amount of attention. The research and services are developing for this demographic but there is still work to be done.

“This is a huge problem and we’re not going to solve it but if we can strive towards fixing it and partner with other people in Pittsburgh and beyond, that’s more power to all of us,” Uman said.