A dim light wavers over the doorway of King Hall, illuminating the red script of the Student Basic Needs Center. However, the door is locked and the Trojan Food pantry is closed until further notice. The Student Basic Needs website is still in operation, however some of the resources it provides like the Trojan Food pantry and Student Basic Needs Emergency Relief Grant program are closed.
Many of the food insecurity resources for students are not easy to access. That’s why Kyra Chan, former president of the Food Recovery Network at USC, started the program in the first place.
Some of the campus resources, like Trojan Food Pantry, only operated during weekdays. As a student, she found this unhelpful, since most of her free time occurred on the weekends. She also felt that other food resources were difficult to access by foot.
She attributes the closure of USC food banks, including her organization, to the pandemic.
“All my volunteers went to their home city, home states, home countries,” Chan said. Now a senior, she has no one willing to take on the leadership post.
“It’s a dying club that barely had life breathed into it,” she said.
Since many resources are shut down due to the pandemic, students are relying more on the government assistance program, CalFresh.
Esther Cho, a third year pre-med student, said she has had difficulty signing up for Calfresh. She describes the process as “long and tedious,” and had trouble finding a campus resource to help her fill out the application.
At the time this article was written the Calfresh application appointment system through Trojan Food Pantry had no available bookings.
Catherine Chen, a third year computer science major, is still trying to figure out the application process. A month after she started the application, she still hasn’t been approved since she is having trouble gathering the documents needed. In the meantime, grocery shopping is a stressful experience and she has taken on more work hours to keep up with food costs.
And many students don’t even realize they qualify. Roger Castle, Chief Development Officer of the Los Angeles Food Bank notes that “less than 30% of eligible people are signed up for CalFresh.”
While there may be many factors as to why students are not signing up for CalFresh, before the pandemic, there have been efforts to rebrand the assistance program to inform students that they qualify. Some campuses like UC Davis have had success with getting students to sign up.
Nolan Sullivan of Yolo Health and Human Services Agency says that many eligible students do not apply for CalFresh due to “the rumor mill” of misinformation about qualification as well as a feeling of “guilt when accessing public benefits.”
There have been efforts to make the assistance program more accessible to students. Sullivan notes that Yolo county had remarkably low Calfresh sign ups and it wasn’t until they targeted the student demographic of UC Davis that they were able to bridge the gap.
He believes that CalFresh sign ups can be more accessible to students through schools focusing on “relationship building with the local government,” in the same way that UC Davis sought to when making CalFresh available to its students.
He notes that modernization is important to reach wider accessibility though counties are still trying to keep up with making food assistance programs available on the internet. Part of UC Davis’ success was that it was easy to fill out online applications that were made available via email to qualifying students. Without an internet application, Calfresh can be more difficult for students to navigate.
Food banks and government assistance programs like CalFresh are some ways to address food insecurity. But as Castle noted, “It’s so pervasive, so big a problem, in our community it won’t be just one thing that solves the problem, we need to come at it from a lot of different angles.”