Office of Student Life volunteers from Cedar Valley College share food with CVC students during the first visit of the North Texas Food Bank’s mobile food pantry. DCCCD and NTFB are partnering to help food-insecure students who attend the district’s colleges. The partnership was launched in September to mark Hunger Action Month.
Contact: Ann Hatch
214-378-1819;
ahatch@dcccd.edu
For immediate release — Sept. 22, 2017
News brief
(DALLAS) — Food insecurity — or lack of access to nutritional foods — in the Dallas area unfortunately is nothing new, including hunger on college campuses. That’s why the North Texas Food Bank and Cedar Valley College joined forces for Hunger Action Month in September when NTFB’s mobile food pantry visited CVC on Wednesday, Sept. 20. Cedar Valley is the first college in the Dallas County Community College District to welcome the mobile food pantry as a way to fight student hunger.
More than 100 Cedar Valley students visited the mobile food pantry and took home approximately 3,000 pounds of food, according to Henry Martinez, director of marketing and public relations for Cedar Valley,
“DCCCD and the North Texas Food Bank are partnering to make food available at all of our colleges,” said Dr. Pyeper Wilkins, chief advancement officer and executive director of the DCCCD Foundation. “Our district participated in the Wisconsin HOPE study last year, and we learned about the level of food insecurity that exists on our college campuses. NTFB will visit every college in our system to determine the best ways to make food available for our students.”
She added, ”Some of our colleges already have food pantries, and we are planning to expand them. Several colleges that don’t have food pantries will either find space for one or will bring the NTFB’s mobile food pantry on site.”
“September is Hunger Action Month, a national movement to mobilize the public to take action against food insecurity. This is the perfect time to launch our partnership with DCCCD to ensure that college students in our community receive the food they need so they can learn and grow,” said Trisha Cunningham, NTFB’s president and CEO.
Dr. Joe Seabrooks, president of Cedar Valley College, said, “I have a new tagline I want to use with this effort — ‘let’s stop the stigma’ — when it comes to meeting this critical need. Most of us have struggled at certain points in our lives, and there is no shame in getting help like this. I also don’t want to underplay the fact that poverty is a significant issue in our region. Strategies like this partnership involving the North Texas Food Bank, Cedar Valley College and the Dallas County Community College District are designed to help make a difference in people’s lives. We are very proud to be a part of this initiative.”
According to the Wisconsin HOPE study conducted in fall 2016, 64 percent of DCCCD students reported “marginal or worse food security” during the previous 30-day period before they took a survey for the study. Twenty-seven percent of DCCCD students reported very low food security, which reflects “multiple indications of reduced food intake and disrupted eating patterns due to inadequate resources for food.”
NTFB’s mobile food pantry will return to Cedar Valley College once a month (except during the month of January).
For more information, contact Wilkins at 214-378-1538 or at
pwilkins@dcccd.edu; Diana Carranza, communications manager for NTFB, at 214-470-8653 or at
dianaca@ntfb.org; or Henry Martinez, Cedar Valley’s director of marketing and public relations, at 972-860-8142 or at
hmartinez@dcccd.edu.
# # #