As Michigan continues to be burdened by a bad economy, one Grand Valley State University alumna hopes to help the people of Detroit by running a food pantry at a local college.

April Meyers, who graduated from GVSU in 2010 with a bachelor’s degree in public and non-profit administration, co-founded a food pantry with Chris Ciavattone at Schoolcraft College near Detroit.

“I decided to create food pantry because I had heard that a lot of other college campuses had very successful food pantries, and I knew quite a few people on campus that had a need for free food and were very food insecure,” she said.

Meyers is working at Schoolcraft College through AmeriCorps VISTA, a national service program designed to help fight poverty through Michigan Campus Compact, which links its members creating sustainable programs with the surrounding community.

Meyers said the project aims to help people who are food insecure do not know where their next meal will come from.

“Food insecurity is basically the lack of basic nutritional needs,” she said. “A person that is food insecure – they don’t really know where there next meal is going to come from. They don’t have money in their pocket to buy lunch, and they literally have no idea how they are going to eat their next meal. And actually one out of eight families in Michigan are food insecure, according to a USDA survey.”

The food pantry was put in Schoolcraft College after talking to different academic departments and administrators.

The pantry will serve close to 13,000 students who go to Schoolcraft and their families. In addition, the pantry will be open to the college’s staff and faculty.

The pantry consists of about 2,000 pounds of food, including non-perishable and canned goods, and is currently taking donations of food and gift cards, which will be used to buy food needed for the pantry.

Aside from the pantry itself, a community garden is being planned for the area. Meyers said a community garden will be beneficial to students who want to study it.

“The importance of a community garden, especially at Schoolcraft, would be there’s a service learning aspect to it,” she said. “We can take biology classes, and they can just help maintain the garden while doing service learning projects such as testing the soil, and they’ll be learning through maintaining the garden.”

Meyers said she hopes having the food pantry will take the stigma away from the issue of food insecurity.

“Currently right now, there is obviously economic downturn and that is why a lot of the food pantries. The college pantries have sprung up, and we just really hope to solve the food insecurity problem and not to put a huge stigma on it because a lot of people feel stigmatized when they’re food insecure,” she said. “ But the truth of the matter is that there are so many college students that are food insecure, and they can be best friends and not even know it. We just want everybody to not feel like they’re being singled out because everybody is going through hard times right now.”

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