LA GRANDE — A staggering one in three college students experience food insecurity, but area individuals and colleges want to ease that burden through a series of measures that include on-campus food pantries, donation programs and raising awareness.

Food insecurity among Oregon college students isn’t a new challenge. A Temple University survey of more than 8,000 Oregon college students in 2019 showed 41% had experienced some sort of food insecurity within the prior 30 days. Almost half — 46% — of respondents said they could not afford to eat balanced meals. Over a third of respondents said they had either skipped or reduced the size of their meals because of a lack of funds.

A 2023 basic needs survey prepared by The Hope Center for College, Community, and Justice at Temple University was sent in January 2023 via email to 1,250 students at Pendleton-based Blue Mountain Community College and had 139 participants. Of those participants, 47% reported a high level of food insecurity.

Nearly 50% of BMCC respondents said they couldn’t afford to eat balanced meals and 23% said they skipped meals or reduced the size of their meals. Over half of all Blue Mountain Community College respondents said they’d experienced either food insecurity, housing insecurity or homelessness.

A common struggle

The food insecurity struggle hasn’t gone unnoticed by college officials. Blue Mountain Community College established a food pantry called The Den. The pantry is open five days a week and is free to both students and the public.

At Eastern Oregon University in La Grande, a local version of a national program called Swipe Out Hunger allows students to donate unused meal card swipes into a pool for fellow students facing food insecurity. The Swipe Out Hunger program is so successful that a bill drafted by former Associated Students of Eastern Oregon University President Keegan Sanchez seeks to bring the program to colleges and universities throughout the state via legislation.

Sanchez, the creator of the Swipe Out Hunger at the university, said he saw the impacts of food insecurity often.

“As a (resident adviser) I noticed a lot of students dropping out and leaving the dorms because they couldn’t afford to pay tuition, the dorms and food,” he said.

Sanchez said he also experienced food insecurity.

“Throughout college I struggled with maintaining that balance of finances. I’ve got tuition, I got rent, I’ve got food bills, I got regular bills and I struggled with making choices, and there were times where I had ramen,” he said. “Or just didn’t eat because I couldn’t afford it.”

Sanchez said speaking to his classmates and peers revealed that food insecurity is a common struggle that just about every college student eventually goes through.

“Especially at Eastern,” he added.

The Den

The Den opened at Blue Mountain Community College in 2018 after years of research and preparation. It is available to everyone and doesn’t charge a fee for its services.

The move appears to be paying off. In July and August of this year, 536 people were served by The Den across 155 households.

This information helps the pantry prove that it is having an impact in the community, which can lead to larger shipments of foodstuffs from local grocers and the Community Action Program of East Central Oregon, or CAPECO, a regional nonprofit that supports local food pantries.

In launching The Den, the college conducted research in 2017 to pinpoint the level of food insecurity among its students at all branches. The study identified that, at that time, more than 45% of students surveyed skimped on or skipped meals because they couldn’t afford food, and 20% of the students surveyed faced this situation on a monthly basis.

Seed money for The Den, which is centrally located in Pioneer Hall’s student union, came from a $2,000 donation from the BMCC Foundation, $1,000 from Altrusa of Pendleton, $700 from the VISTA program and $450 from BMCC’s Innovation Fund.

According to the college’s 2023-24 annual budget, the food pantry has an operating budget of $8,500, a boost over the $5,121 from the previous year and the $2,621 it took to operate in 2020-21 and 2021-22.

“The reason (for the budget increase) is that we just continue to see a growing need,” BMCC President Mark Browning said.

Blue Mountain Community College resource navigator MaRanda Soliz said deliveries from CAPECO usually arrive once a month and the amount of food they receive is based on the number of people the pantry serves.

Students at the community college who have used The Den describe the pantry as a vital piece of their college services.

Tavo Estrella, a 19-year-old freshman at BMCC, currently lives at home with his parents and three siblings. Estrella started using the food pantry about a month ago to secure food and snacks for his family.

“They’re grateful for it,” he said of his parents. There are a lot of mouths to feed at home, he said, and so the healthy, free food stocked in the pantry eases their worry over the cost of groceries.

Another BMCC freshman, Laney Beckstead, 18, works part-time at the food pantry. She said she watched her older siblings worry about food during their years in college.

“I’m one of the youngest, and all of them have gone to college without this type of resource,” she said. “They have struggled with finding food and getting enough food to manage their health.”

Beckstead said having the food pantry available means she doesn’t have to worry about finding and having food the way her siblings did when they were pursuing higher education.

“It’s really nice,” she said.

One of the reasons The Den has been so widely utilized by both students and the broader community is the dynamic the pantry operates with.

“It’s a pretty fair statement to say students feel comfortable, community feels comfortable and staff feels comfortable coming through this place without judgment,” Blue Mountain Community College Student Resources Director Roman Olivera said.

Soliz said the pantry typically stocks fresh produce, canned fruits and vegetables (which are highly used), dried foods like macaroni and other pastas, tomato sauce, diced tomatoes, beans, rice, ham, cheese and nuts. One of the unique things about The Den is the pantry has a freezer, which allows a wider assortment of food offerings.

“Ground beef and chicken are highly sought after,” she said. Not just by students but also by community members, she added, especially since most food pantries don’t have fridges or freezers.

Soliz said students and the community have been appreciative of The Den and the services it provides.

“From what they’ve expressed to me, they’re really thankful and grateful that it’s here,” she said. “We’ve been able to build this up, and I’m so glad that I was able to take this position and meet all these students and hear their needs and their appreciation as well.”

The Den is open to members of the community 2-5 p.m. on Tuesdays and Thursdays and to BMCC students and staff 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Friday.

BMCC has campuses in Baker City, Boardman, Hermiston and Milton-Freewater in addition to its main campus in Pendleton. Although its other locations do not have outposts of The Den, there are pickup locations in all five cities.

Students and community members can order boxes through an online form and select the food they’d like to receive. The form does not have meat or other refrigerated or frozen food as options.

“A lot of those don’t have a lot of foot traffic,” Soliz said. “We schedule those deliveries periodically as needed. But we are working on setting up a food pantry over in Hermiston, one of our more popular centers.”

Even at the smaller campuses, there are still necessity stations with hygiene products and grab-and-go snacks.

“They get replenished over time as requested,” she said. “They are smaller, so they don’t run out as quickly.”

Swipe Out Hunger

While Eastern Oregon University has a pantry, the addition of the Swipe Out Hunger program is a big leap ahead in terms of stamping out food insecurity among students.

Sanchez said his ascension to the office of student body president spurred him into action in addressing hunger on campus.

“Once I became ASEOU president and realized I had the power and the ability to make an impact,” he said, “I started it right away.”

Sanchez said his effort involved reaching out to the national Swipe Out Hunger organization in 2020 to get more information about the program.

“By winter, we were actively developing and working on getting it implemented in the system and were able to get it to go live in spring,” he said.

Sanchez said he’s heard good things about the program from students at EOU.

“Freshmen were very happy to participate in the program,” he said. “The whole concept is sometimes (students) will buy meal plans and they just buy an (overabundance) of them and they don’t ever use all their meal swipes each term.”

The program allows students to donate unused swipes, to be used by other students.

For Sanchez, a La Grande native, hearing stories of food insecurity at the college in his hometown made the desire to combat food insecurity at EOU a personal one.

“It’s one thing when you’re going out of state or leaving your community, but to see people who you knew and you grew up with struggling, it impacts you differently,” he said. “They’re not just strangers. They’re people who you went to high school with or played sports against.”

Current Associated Students of Eastern Oregon University President Calvin Bennett said Swipe Out Hunger is a good resource for EOU students.

“I actually know quite a few people as personal friends who utilize the resource not only to give but also receive meals that really help with food insecurity here on campus,” he said.

Bennett noted there is an initial “sticker shock” that comes with the cost of food for college students, especially freshmen and those who are experiencing living away from home for the first time.

“That is a big shock for people,” he said. “I really like the term ‘sticker shock.’ It’s gotten to a lot of people especially, as you know, (since) inflation has been killer.”

With that inflation comes rising food prices, something Bennett has noticed over the past few years.

“That’s why food insecurity has been a really big part of not only my administration, but the ASEOU over the last four years and just in general,” he said. “We realize that (inflation is) a big problem.”

Swipe Out Hunger has been such a successful program at Eastern that Sanchez is leading a push to roll the program out at colleges and universities across Oregon. House Bill 3089, also known as the Hunger Free Campus Bill, was drafted by Sanchez and would help fund colleges to start their own Swipe Out Hunger programs, establish food pantries and create opportunities for students to enroll in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, Oregon’s food stamps.

Sanchez said he looked to other states that had already passed similar legislation for ideas as to how to go about crafting the bill.

“I looked at California, Pennsylvania, Louisiana, a bunch of different states that have already passed this bill, looked at what works, what can be improved and drafted it,” he said.

Sanchez said most states didn’t have very large pools of money for colleges to draw from and didn’t prioritize the funds the way his bill does.

“We wanted to make sure we had adequate funds to make sure everyone is properly served,” he said. “Pennsylvania, for example, their initial passing of the bill only had a $1 million grant — which is a lot of money, but it doesn’t go very far when you’re looking at trying to reach everyone.”

The Oregon bill proposes the creation of a $5 million pool from the state’s general fund, which colleges and universities would apply to for funding.

While HB 3089 ultimately didn’t make it to a floor vote during the last legislative session, Sanchez said the bill had bipartisan support and he is confident it would pass if put to a vote.

“With the amount of support we saw, if it makes it through committee I’m almost certain it would get passed on the floors,” he said. “It’s just getting through committee.”

Sanchez said one of the major hurdles that will affect the passage of the legislation will be working out the amount of funding lawmakers are willing to provide.

What else can be done?

While The Den and Swipe Out Hunger are widely utilized resources, those programs alone don’t solve the problem of food insecurity among college students at the two institutions. The rising costs of other needs have to be addressed, according to Sanchez.

“The rising cost of housing and bills and tuition is honestly probably the biggest hurdle to student hunger,” he said.

Sanchez said these costs are all connected and that working toward lowering the cost of attending college should be the overall, long-term goal.

“So I think a really long way to go is getting tuition costs down, either through increasing funding at a federal level to the Pell Grant or at the state level to the Oregon Opportunity Grant to make sure colleges and universities are being funded,” he said.

Bennett said he isn’t sure what all the answers are in combating food insecurity among college students but the current strategy appears to be helping.

“I’m not sure where it will end or what the perfect equilibrium is in the market,” he said, “but I do like the path we’re moving on right now, and I have to give a big ‘thank you’ to Keegan Sanchez for his work.”