The Student Food Pantry has received several donations from UTRGV departments and organizations, including $4,000 worth of food from Athletics and $3,330 from the Chinese Student & Scholar Association.
The donations were given to help students who may be struggling with food insecurity during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Jacqueline Herrera, Student Food Pantry coordinator, said the department takes online orders and schedules dates for pickup on both campuses. Its operating hours are 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesdays and 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Fridays.
Students must be taking at least one UTRGV course to receive help.
“For both offices, we have two scheduled pickup dates,” Herrera said. “So, you know, the students order, like, a day before and our pickup dates are Tuesdays and Fridays. … The students come in and their orders are already ready.”
She said this helps by not having students cramp up in the hallways waiting for their order to be bagged.
“They just come in, pick up their order and they leave as soon as they walk in,” Herrera said. “It takes them literally 10 seconds to get their order. So, that’s what we’ve been doing.”
Last month 111 students received help from the department.
Herrera said the Student Food Pantry orders from the food bank every two weeks and has received donations on the Edinburg campus.
“The biggest donation that we’ve received would be in Edinburg and it was from the baseball team,” Herrera said. “Obviously, their season did not go through as we all planned, and we all wanted it, so they donated their concessions items to the food pantry.”
She said they have also received donations from Student Success. Students, faculty and staff are also welcomed to send food or monetary donations.
Herrera said there are donation bins available on both the Edinburg and Brownsville campuses.
“The students, or anybody, can come in and donate and they won’t have contacted anybody else,” she said. “The bin is there, they leave their donations in there and, obviously, we keep track of every donation that we get. If they don’t want to do food donations, like I said, there’s monetary donations online, which is, basically, what we’ve been promoting a little bit more lately just because, you know, the students won’t have to come to campus. They could just do it online.”
Associate Athletic Director for Communications Jonah Goldberg said the department is always looking for ways to give back to the campus.
Goldberg said there are a lot of students who are food insecure during the COVID-19 pandemic and the department does not want to see that.
“We have a lot of food in our concession stand because we were planning on having more baseball games this year and with sports canceled, you know, our options were, we can hold on to that food for next year and some things can be frozen certainly, like hotdogs, and probably hold on to it for soccer or volleyball season and whatnot. But, we decided it would be better to give it to people who need it right now.”
He said the department will worry about what they will do next year when the time comes, because it is not about them, it is about the people in need during the crisis, and they want to do their part to help everyone.
For more information on the food pantry, visit https://www.utrgv.edu/foodpantry/.
