Championing the Pantry

Stepping up to help feed students 

Joshua Dunne and Podge Sheehan on why they established a pantry to help students tackle the cost-of-living crisis.  

After a tour of the Pantry located in the heart of the Dublin City University Glasnevin Campus, I began by asking its creators how they identified food insecurity amongst students as an issue that they wanted to address. 

Podge Sheehan: We conducted a survey, and from that we noticed how food poverty and the ability to be able to afford third level education was a big challenge. Obviously, we can't hand students money, so we thought, well what else could we do?  

Jack Walsh: What is the Pantry? 

Joshua Dunne: The Pantry is a response to the cost-of-living crisis. It started off with meal kits before Christmas. After we proved the concept, we moved on to a pantry store. Students can get six items for free of charge which helps them build a basic meal. 

JW: Is there a particular cohort of students who use the Pantry? 

PS: In addition to your more typical students aged 18-22, we noticed we were reaching a whole new cohort of students in particular international students, mature students and postgraduate students. The Pantry is a service that's really meeting their needs. 

JW: How many students use the Pantry? 

JD: In total we had around 2,800 individual students use it in Semester 2, which is a huge uptake. Before Christmas with the meal kits, we were probably servicing 200 students a week. 

JW: Is having two campuses here in DCU a challenge? 

PS: Yes. We don't have the capacity to open a pantry store on the second campus. What we can do is have the meal kit service available there and if students would then like to take advantage of the Pantry they can come to this campus. 

JW: How do you think the Pantry will help to impact change? 

JD: I suppose it's just about bringing exposure to the issue of food poverty. I don't think in this day and age there should be a worry around food and food poverty. It has made us talk more about this issue which is needed given there's that Irish shame about those things.  

PS: We also really wanted to make sure the Pantry is connected to the wider university and is linked in with all the support services that are available. If a student is using the service regularly, we can direct them towards the student assistance fund if they’ve additional financial needs for example.  

JW: Where do you see the Pantry going in the future? 

JD: We would like to widen the offering, pushing more towards fresh fruit and veg, as well as other types of refrigerated stock. The thing we need to concentrate on at the moment is the funding aspect before we concentrate on the expansion of the service. 

PS: I would hate to think that it's here permanently, because if we need to provide food pantries for students, there's something chronically wrong in the system. Nonetheless, it's going to be here in the medium term, so we need to work out how to make it live on, even if we're not the people that are driving it. 

Interview by Jack Walsh.

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