Lila Puziss

The Bear Bites food pantry is located at the Brown School of Social Work. The pantry aims to provide students with a variety of different healthy options

The Bear Bites food pantry, a program initially launched in 2019 to address food insecurity within the Brown School of Social Work, will open its doors to all Washington University students starting Friday.

One hundred new students have already signed up, and will be able to pick up bags of food and hygiene products on the lower level of Goldfarb Hall every Wednesday and Friday. Students can choose between vegetarian, fish and meat options, in addition to canned and packaged foods, snacks and more.

Seniors Lila Puziss, Sasha Chapnick-Sorokin and Gwen Klein began advocating for this expansion in August, after their experience on a committee for under-resourced students highlighted the need for such a resource.

“We were doing our research, we talked to people who run pantries at other universities, and basically learned that all other elite private universities of our caliber that we would call peer institutions had food pantries,” Puziss said. “It just seems a little silly that we have similar demographics in our student body, so it’s likely that we would also have a need for a food pantry, but we weren’t providing [that resource].” 

Chapnick-Sorokin explained that part of the reason for this lack of resources stemmed from the fact that Washington University has historically been an institution with an extremely low percentage of low-income students. 

“Wash. U. is unique because we weren’t really pushing to get a high population of Pell-eligible students until a couple years ago,” she said. “So the resources that are necessary to serve low-income students haven’t really existed, because that wasn’t [on] the agenda for the administration in the past five years or so.”

Although the University’s percentage of Pell-eligible students has risen from 8% to 15% over the last five years, the networks to support these students are still being built. Puziss noted that the process of actually building these networks is not always easy, citing a number of roadblocks caused by COVID-19 related budget cuts. 

“We had initially planned to launch our own pantry that would serve as the main university pantry and then hopefully have Bear Bites as a satellite,” Puziss said. “But… it just seemed like a lot of administrative campus partners were not willing to take on this project because even though we had already secured funding for outside grants, we needed a physical space and also some administrative support and personnel.”

Due to those roadblocks, Puziss said that the most viable way to create a food support resource of all students would be to expand Bear Bites in its scope, funding and mission. 

In addition to a total of $3,000 contributed by the Washington University Women’s Society, the Center for Diversity and Inclusion and the Gephardt Center for Civic Engagement, Bear Bites also receives funding from Dining Services and the Swipe out Hunger student group. 

“In the past, Swipe out Hunger would give their donations to the food bank, but they decided that as a student group, they want to give some of that money to the Brown School,” Assistant Dean for Student Affairs at the Brown School Danielle Bristow explained. “Also, Dining Services is paying for our work-study student to help with the initiative.”

Bear Bites also makes some purchases through the Food Security Fund, a program that allows students to donate their leftover meal points to support their peers.

Now that the program has been launched and promoted on social media, Student Affairs Coordinator Miriam Joelson, who has been involved with Bear Bites since its inception, noted some of the logistical challenges resulting from the expansion. 

“We expanded to two pick-up days—Wednesdays and Fridays—with 24 time-slots each, and are in the process of hiring a second student to distribute bags every Friday,” Joelson wrote in a statement to Student Life. “Even with additional support and time-slots, it will be important that we take close stock of our inventory each week and continue our strong partnership with Dining Services and the Saint Louis Area Food Bank in order for the program to be successful and sustainable in the long-term.”

Despite those hurdles, sophomore Bel Orinda, a student worker at the pantry, expressed excitement about the uptick in activity at Bear Bites. 

“There will definitely be a lot more coordinating, in terms of making sure we can serve everybody,” Orinda said. “But I think [as] with any good thing it might get a little more complicated, but it pays back ten times.”

In order to ensure that this trend of high participation continues, Chapnick-Sorokin explained that she would be coordinating a social media campaign to reduce the stigma around accessing community resources such as Bear Bites by emphasizing the principles of autonomy and dignity.

“One social media campaign we’re hoping to start in the near future is posting recipes for what the students can make with the items that they’ll be getting in their bag through the food pantry, just to show how you can use the food,” she said. “We don’t want you to just be eating a cup of noodles every night. We want students to have autonomy.”

If students continue to engage with Bear Bites in this way, Joelson hopes that the program’s success can be used to justify further expansion.

“We are interested in collecting some data about need/usage of Bear Bites to see how it might look next year and what additional capacity we might have to have in terms of space, funding and staffing,” Joelson wrote. 

Whatever direction the program takes in the future, Orinda is excited to keep engaging with and supporting the students who access the pantry. 

“In terms of my work it’ll be a lot more exciting,” Orinda said. “I’ll get to meet a lot more people, which will be a lot more fun.”