Colorado
Food pantry programs aim to reduce hunger on Colorado college campuses where half of students go hungry
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.
As Weld County and Northern Colorado continue to grow, leaders at the Greeley-Weld County Airport are preparing for an expansion they say will position the facility as a major transportation and economic hub for the region.
Airport director Cooper Anderson said the airport has reached a point where additional growth on its current footprint is no longer possible.
“We have reached our capacity, here, as far as growth on the south side of the airport,” Anderson said.
The airport is now developing land northeast of its existing facilities to accommodate larger aircraft and future aviation services.
“We needed to find a new area to expand and allow larger corporate jets, and eventual charters and commercial service down the road,” Anderson said.
Construction is already underway or completed on several infrastructure projects, including expanded taxiways and sites for future hangars. Anderson said the area being developed was farmland just a few years ago.
“It used to be corn fields, but since then we have ran water, sewage and gas is coming next week,” Anderson said.
The expansion effort has been supported by a combination of local and federal funding. Anderson noted that approximately $850,000 in federal funding was previously secured to develop a master design and long-term vision for the airport, with local money helping execute the plan. Additional federal tax dollars in recent years also helped fund taxiway expansion projects that have prepared the airport for future growth.
Now, Colorado leaders in congress are seeking millions more in federal funding to continue that momentum.
Rep. Gabe Evans, who represents Colorado’s 8th Congressional District, said the airport plays an important role in one of the nation’s busiest aviation corridors.
“The northern Front Range of Colorado is one of the densest airspace systems in the nation,” Evans said.
Before entering Congress, Evans served as a Black Hawk helicopter pilot out of Buckley Air Force Base and frequently flew throughout Northern Colorado. He said improvements at the Greeley airport would have benefits extending well beyond Weld County, noting other airports are overcrowded to the point of causing some nearby residents to complain of sound.
“It really does impact the entire Front Range,” Evans said.
Evans is working to secure additional federal funding that would help construct and staff an air traffic control tower in Greeley while supporting continued infrastructure improvements.
“When those bills are passed and sent to the president’s desk, writtten into those bills as a line item is several more million dollars to continue to expand the infrastructure at the Greeley airport,” Evans said. “So you can actually start to bring business flights into the Greeley airport and pull a lot of that traffic off of some of the overburdened airports in the metro area.”
Anderson said federal support demonstrates broad confidence in the airport’s future as a hub for business and travel.
“Having the addition of Congressman Evans’ office, and their congressional funding, I think shows how much everybody believes in this,” Anderson said.
That confidence is already attracting attention from the private sector, Anderson said, with major companies expressing interest in locating operations at the airport.
“Greeley’s population is booming. Weld County’s population in general is growing,” Anderson said.
Airport leaders view the expansion as a way to support economic development across the region.
“By us growing, and expanding our services, we are also helping the city of Greeley, Weld County and surrounding Northern Colorado communities and being able to grow economic opportunities for them,” Anderson said.
As the airport prepares for future growth, officials have also upgraded emergency response capabilities. The airport recently acquired two fire trucks that will improve its ability to respond to incidents involving larger aircraft. The vehicles also allow firefighters to use newer, non-toxic firefighting foam, replacing older products that posed environmental concerns.
Airport officials say those improvements will help ensure the facility can safely accommodate larger aircraft and increased traffic in the years ahead.
Colorado
‘We couldn’t do this in another place’: Horror film looks to make Southern Colorado the next Hollywood
COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. (KKTV) – It’s commonly understood that many of the best blockbusters are made in Southern California but a group of local filmmakers wants to prove Southern Colorado can be a destination for both aspiring and established auteurs.
Shooting began in Fountain this spring on ‘Devil In The Trunk’, a new horror film set in Colorado’s eastern plains.
“Devil In The Trunk is about a small-town woman who encounters a mysterious traveler driving this car right here who claims to have the actual devil trapped in the trunk of her car,” executive producer Leon Kelly said. “As you can imagine, when the devil comes to your small town, terrible and dangerous things can happen.”
Director, writer, and producer Evan Alderson said they wanted to make the film as Colorado as possible.
“We ended up finding a local Colorado writer, and we ended up collaborating to come up with this idea that could act as a love letter to Colorado,” he said.
While Colorado may be most famous for its soaring mountain peaks, Kelly said the plains were a much more fitting setting.
“It’s both beautiful and dangerous at the same time,” he said. “One of the underlying themes is the desolation and the loneliness and how vulnerable some folks can be in small towns and out in rural areas.”
Kelly said not only is the film meant to showcase Colorado’s natural beauty, but also to showcase the talent of the people who live there.
“It’s a proof of concept, to show that we have not only the talented people but the infrastructure that can support really high-quality, independent films,” he said. “We know we’ve got great filmmakers here, we know we have really talented craftspeople here, but they don’t necessarily have the opportunities to work on something like this on this scale that’s a narrative film.”
With the Sundance Film Festival set to make its debut in Boulder in 2027, Kelly said people are asking new questions about what Colorado can do for those looking to tell stories on the big screen.
“Can Colorado become a hub? Can that be a place, a destination where others come? Can that be a place where our own filmmakers can come into their own?” he said.
Alderson said once the film is finished they will put it out on the film festival circuit, and even look for distribution.
“That will look like a theatrical release, potentially, in an ideal world, or it will be straight to streaming services like Amazon, Hulu, that type of stuff,” he said.
Copyright 2026 KKTV. All rights reserved.
The now 19-year-old victim, who Brent Metz is accused of shooting in the face, took the stand in Metz’s trial Thursday. Metz, a former town of Mountain View councilman, was in the second day of his trial hearings.
The teenager, who has recovered well physically from the shooting back in September of 2024, told the story of what led up to the shooting, then said he blacked out for a period after he was shot.
The young man, Jack (CBS Colorado is not sharing the victim’s last name) said he and his younger friend went to ask for permission to take pictures at a scenic home near Conifer. At first, they parked outside the gated driveway and tried to figure out how to contact someone there. They then hopped a low fence and went up to the house.
Jack said he had difficulty locating a front door on the home, but the large property also had a garage and barn. They heard music coming from the barn, which is a common practice for people with animals to leave music playing to calm animals while away.
“We decided to knock on the barn door and then after a couple a minutes we decided to go back down the driveway,” Jack said in court.
The two friends went back over the fence and moved the car to a spot not blocking the driveway along the right-of-way at the road. Minutes later, Brent Metz drove up in his black GMC pickup truck, blocking their car in. Metz got out. Jack testified that he raised his hands at some point, a claim the defense questioned in cross examination. He related that he was getting out to try to greet the person getting out of the truck.
“I just (got) the door open I kind of turned to open my door and then turned to get out, and I saw someone get out, and then it was black,” Jack said.
The victim soon awoke bleeding and injured. “I looked down and I thought I was going to die. So I said that a couple times,” Jack testified.
“My mouth was on fire and it felt like my upper lip was gone, and I could taste little fragments,” Jack told the court. Jack’s friend and Metz tried to help him out of the car.
“The one who shot me was trying to help me get out of the car.”
Soon after, Metz left his side.
“He helped me sit down, and then he walked away,” Jack said.
“I started to realize I needed to stay as calm as I could, and when I got out of the car, I sat down, but I was very anxious,” Jack recalled.
Later, the victim had to have surgery in order to have the bullet fragments removed from his face. One of the fragments was more than an inch in size. He had trouble breathing through his right nostril due to the injuries to his nose. His eye was blackened for a long time, and a tooth was shattered.
Jack did not remember Metz saying much.
The testimony followed hours of testimony from a gun testing expert who looked at the weapon at the request of the prosecution. Derek Watkins is an engineer who said he has seen many claims of weapons not working properly.
“My experience is that, if you manufacture a firearm, at some point in time, it’s going, you’re going to run across the claim that it behaves in a defective manner,” Watkins said.
Metz’s defense is centered on a claim that the Sig Sauer P320 he had fired on its own without Metz pulling the trigger.
“There was nothing about the gun through the testing or through the examination of the components indicating it would function any other way than it was designed and left the factory,” Watkins said.
The defense had little luck getting Watkins to agree the gun could fire on its own, but did try to point out to the jury in questions that Watkins has previously testified in civil litigation about the gun’s integrity on behalf of the manufacturer.
The case continues Friday when it could wrap up. Metz faces four charges, the most serious of which is second-degree assault, but also two menacing charges and one of illegal discharge of a firearm.
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