Advocacy Proposal

I decided to focus my advocacy on food insecurity amongst college students. I chose this problem because I believe that being a part of a campus community, I am able to immerse myself with students who come from many different socioeconomic backgrounds who all have different responsibilities when it comes to balancing both school and their well being. There are many students who find that paying for necessities is difficult. The scope of my project will mostly try to focus on the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign or more generally the population of college students in the United States.

After doing some research, I found that over 71% of college students are “non- traditional” college students which means they are not students who entered college straight after high school. Also these students are not only responsible for themselves, but they are also responsible for dependents and have to make ends meet while studying. This can be in the form of a part time job. My audience for this project will be students and university officials who can create programs to help students who face food insecurity. I am proposing better advertisements for food assistance and activities that guide people to making smart monetary decisions with limited funds.I think that this is important because many students who do live in university housing have to purchase a meal plan in order to eat. Once those meals/funds deplete, many students can end up starving. By having food pantries in place, these students would have more access to food. I would also expand the days our food pantry is open since our food pantry is only open two days a week ( Tuesday and Saturday) this is because there needs to be more flexibility on when people can get food. If there are only 2/7 days of the week it may not works since the time is from 1-4 pm on Tuesdays and 2-5pm on Saturdays. Many of these students may be studying or working. I also want to make more locations for these pantries since the ARC can be very far from students who live far away from the ARC and have to walk all the way there. If there are more options for these students to get food. My last initiative will be to create a cafeteria in the union for free food for students. These would need more funding for these programs so I would need to talk to the University officials.

Some of the already existing programs in place at our university, is the Food Assistance and Well-Being program at the ARC. This program is a volunteer based food pantry that has donated groceries for students that need them. This program also has links to other places that are accessible to students who need more options for meals that are either free or reduced in price. The initiative that I propose will call for an increase in exposure to these resources on campus. This will come in the form of initiatives to create more advertisements, make sure to talk about these during new student orientation and expanding the food pantry that already exists on campus so that there is a wider variety of foods that can be added for students to have more diverse food access. Since tracking food insecurity is fairly difficult to do, due to the fact that not every college student who struggles with food insecurity wants to disclose it, and that the Department of Education does not track food insecurity it is more difficult to track how effective the food pantries are. However, Feeding America tracked MSU and knows that they have served about 6,000 people and families.