GREELEY — When he was a freshman living in the dorms at the University of Northern Colorado, Ryan Wood would sometimes face a choice late at night: Would he be exhausted the next day, or should he steal some dinner from the communal refrigerator?

“I was so hungry at times,” Wood said, “that I couldn’t sleep.”

Wood no longer has to make that impossible decision. He volunteers at the Bear Pantry, UNC’s food bank for students, but he remains a client. Many students in universities across Colorado face the same occasional hunger: More than half of UNC’s students, 57%, said in a survey that they faced food insecurity.

UNC hopes to address student hunger by opening a new Center for Student Well Being at the start of the spring semester that will triple the size of the Bear Pantry and will help students find other resources, such as federal food benefits, to keep them full.

The survey suggests that a majority of UNC’s students don’t always have access to food, or they might skip snacks, or rely a little too much on dollar deals at fast-food joints or eat too much of one food, like cans of soup.

The reasons vary widely, and just like those who use a food bank, they’re not always strictly about money. 

Wood, 22 and a senior now, admits he’s not dirt poor. He doesn’t have student loans, for example. But he also doesn’t have a car and Greeley is far from his family just outside of San Francisco. He relies on UNC’s meal plan to feed himself, and the limited hours don’t always jibe with his schedule. Places to buy groceries are scarce around UNC: The closest is a King Soopers a mile walk away. Wood also doesn’t have the money to spend on DoorDash or pay for a ride to the store.

Still, he felt ashamed for asking UNC for food, and guilty for taking it, given that he could pay for college without borrowing money. He remembers hovering close to the Bear Pantry entry for a few minutes before a student volunteer coaxed him inside. This is why Freddie Horn, a graduate student who runs the pantry to get clinical hours for a degree in mental health counseling, tries to say hello to everyone who walks inside. He wants them to feel welcome. Apparently it’s working.

“Sometimes they won’t get any food at all,” Horn said of his regulars. “They just want to stop in and say hello.”

A national crisis 

Student hunger isn’t just a UNC problem. Colorado State University, for example, estimates more than 40% of its students face some sort of food insecurity. But really, it’s a nationwide problem, said John Hancock, UNC’s assistant vice president for wellness and support. This year, for the first time, the Council for the Advancement of Standards in Higher Education, an organization with a lofty goal of enhancing student learning, development and success, chose to measure, in part, a university’s ability to meet its students’ basic needs. The move, Hancock said, was a stunning confirmation of just how many students are going without food or housing that meets minimum standards across the country.

Data released in July by the U.S. General Accountability Office showed about 3.8 million college students, or about 23%, experienced food insecurity in 2020, the majority of whom reported multiple instances of eating less than they should or skipping meals because they could not afford food.

“Just about every college is thinking about this,” Hancock said, “and it’s getting worse.”

In 2014, UNC started the pantry on the urging of students, who then ran the service by volunteering. Now UNC is not only tripling the size of it, it also has hired a full-time staff person to supervise the work. 

Here’s yet another way to measure the problem: On Mondays, Horn said, the food pantry’s restocking day, there’s a line out the door that stretches the length of the University Center, where more fortunate students can snack on Subway sandwiches or eat a lunch on their meal plan.

The staff member overseeing the pantry, Taylor Schiestel, went after her job hard a few months ago after she learned in the interview about the Bear Pantry expansion. She was born and raised in Greeley, a traditionally blue-collar city that has lower income rates than its neighbors Fort Collins or Loveland, and she’s worked with economically vulnerable populations, including those at the Rodarte Center in Greeley, for years.

“Anything I can do to build my community,” Schiestel said.

Students, she said, are a unique case. Yes, they’ve always traditionally struggled: A standard joke is they keep instant Ramen companies in business (the cheap homemade noodle packets, not the trendy restaurant fare).

“But they shouldn’t have to struggle,” Schiestel said. “Your education should be enough. If we can ease this burden for you, let us do that.”

The Bear Pantry goes beyond just supplying food. Horn tries to teach students how to shop for groceries, keep the food fresh and use healthy recipes that may provide leftovers for a couple days.

“Groceries are expensive now,” Schiestel said. “I think we can all acknowledge that.”

UNC’s hiring of her, she said, does show that the university cares. “It was an act of love.”

But it was also an investment, Schiestel and Hancock said. Student retention rates go up when they thrive. When students are hungry, they’re likely struggling with other things. Wood is a good example of how hunger can affect sleep or an ability to focus or have the energy to go work out. When those things slip, grades do as well, and it becomes more likely that they will drop out.

The high cost of college

 So here’s the elephant in the room: Would students be hungry if they weren’t paying such high tuition rates? Hancock admits that the high costs of education are part of the problem, along with unprecedented increases in the cost of housing since the pandemic.

“It’s an uncomfortable truth that when students go hungry,” said Michael Buttram, CSU’s basic needs manager, “it’s partly because they’re paying such high tuition.”

Hunger, in fact, is the easiest to solve, Buttram said. Tuition won’t go down, and neither will rents, he said. Transportation can also be an issue, as Wood shows.

“The best work we are doing is around food insecurity,” Buttram said.

When Buttram started at CSU, in 2017, it had a mobile food pantry. That wasn’t his primary job, but once the pandemic hit, CSU got some of the dollars that followed and created a position for Buttram (he actually wrote the job description and was fortunate enough to be hired, he said).

“The pandemic gave higher education the liberty to really act upon it,” Buttram said. “It showed us all how close we all were to food insecurity, and it helped us have a bigger heart for everyone.”

He helped create a meal program where up to 50 meals a month are distributed tor those who sign up, much like a Meals on Wheels program. Rams Against Hunger also runs a pantry with the assistance of the Food Bank for Larimer County (Weld Food Bank helps UNC), and pocket pantries scattered across the Fort Collins campus for CSU students who just want to grab a lunch. There’s a meal swipe card program, where a limited number of students can get free meal plans. There’s even a text chain to 2,000 students to pick up food leftover from catered events. The pandemic ended three years ago, but the programs have continued.

“Once you start something like that,” Buttram said, “you aren’t going to stop.”

Universities won’t cut tuition, but Hancock said UNC tries to keep costs affordable, especially when compared to other Colorado schools. Housing remains a challenge, but textbooks can be replaced at times with free online materials.

“I’ve done a lot of thinking about this,” Hancock said. “The key is just to support students as much as possible.”

Shoving aside the stigma

The new Bear Pantry will be smack dab in the middle of the University Center at UNC, next to a snack shop, a few strides from Subway and in the main walkway of one of UNC’s busiest buildings.

“It won’t be tucked away,” Hancock said, “It will be front and center.”

The idea behind the visibility is to reduce the stigma that students may feel for using the pantry. It will also make it easier to find for students, as far too many still don’t know they can get free food when they need it.

The larger goal of the pantry is to help students not rely on it so much, and that’s why it will be contained in a Center for Student Well Being. The center will help students navigate resources, Hancock said, including counseling and applying for an emergency support fund that can help them pay for a car repair or sign up for food stamps. Many students qualify for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, commonly called SNAP, but few enroll.

That could be, partly, because students don’t like to think of themselves as needing food stamps when the whole point of college is to eventually avoid them. And getting students to pick up leftovers from an event or have a meal delivered may feel just as icky.

Ideally, all students could get a free meal swipe card because that puts them in the same category as everyone else, Buttram said, and no one knows the difference between the free swipes and the paid ones. But that’s expensive.

“We’re always searching or ways to get more free meal swipes,” Buttram said. “That’s a very dignity affirming approach.”

Instead, Buttram encourages students to think of it as reducing food waste. The leftovers they don’t accept from catering will just be thrown away, he said, and food in the pantry that isn’t used will go bad.

“As a society we waste 40% of the food we create,” Buttram said. “We’re just trying to reduce that amount.”

It’s also why Horn makes eye contact with every student who comes in the door. Just five minutes of his time, he said, can make anyone feel seen or validated. He didn’t learn that from his counseling classes. He learned it from his time at the Bear Pantry.