After a week spent collecting donations, Santa Fe’s liberal arts and science department won in the school’s first Hunger Action Challenge food drive on Friday, having donated over $2,000 in food and toiletries.
Andrea Mender, the director of grants development and the chapter president for the Association of Florida Colleges at Santa Fe, spent three months planning the competition alongside AFC. Through the competition, Santa Fe has been able to provide a food pantry for its students, she said.
The Saints Food Share Program provides students with free baked goods and non-perishable groceries.
”We want to do what we can,” Mender said. “We're able to do that here by supporting our Saints Food Share Program.”
Each September, which is national Hunger Action Month, the AFC hosts a food drive competition across Florida public colleges. AFC has been hosting this competition for 19 years.
Santa Fe joined 28 other colleges this year. Many of its departments competed to see which could donate the most food.
Friday’s winner was calculated by a point system that’s meant to prioritize foods easiest for students to store and prepare. One point is awarded for each perishable food item, two are awarded for non-perishable items and three are awarded for microwavable and ready to eat meals.
This year’s winners totaled 257.38 points.
The drive began Sept. 8, giving participants a week to donate at their respective department buildings.
Donations collected through Santa Fe’s food drive will go to the new Saints Care Center, a year-round campus resource stocked by students and staff that provides basic needs like food and hygiene products.
The resource is meant to give students a quick, easily accessible meal option while they’re on campus, said JB Brown, who coordinates the Saints Care Center.
Food insecurity is not unheard of on college campuses, she added, with nearly a quarter of undergraduate students in U.S. colleges and universities finding it difficult to get regular healthy meals. Through AFC’s Hunger Action Challenge, Santa Fe hopes to help alleviate students' anxieties surrounding food insecurity, Brown said.
Some students hesitate to take advantage of the Saints Care Center and food share program, she said, but food and basic necessities shouldn’t get in the way of a student’s success.
“We work with the totality of the student to provide them with resources and not just one aspect, so that they can do well in their classes,” Brown said.
Dominick Piccirillo, a 20-year-old pre-med environmental science sophomore, is the president of Santa Fe’s Bread of the Mighty chapter, one of the organizations that helped coordinate the competition. The chapter’s main goal is to provide volunteer support to Bread of the Mighty and surrounding volunteer sites, Piccirillo said.
“By us providing food to those students that need it, they can dedicate more time to school and set themselves up for the future,” he said.
Contact Lilyanna Collado at lcollado@alligator.org. Follow her on X at @lilyannacollado.
Lilyanna Collado is a junior journalism student and this is her first semester at The Alligator! This semester she is the Santa Fe reporter. When she's not writing she either reading, going to theme parks and spending time with her four dogs.
