By Joshua Phelps
The Scene staff
Forest Park has a food pantry, but many on campus don’t know about it.
The Brown Bag Cafe is a place where students can get non-perishable food items and, on occasion, fresh vegetables.
“I think it’s a great idea that they have the Brown Bag Cafe open for students to get a snack, just so they can make it through their day,” said Brenda Bell-Foster, secretary for science, technology, engineering and mathematics.
The STEM department and other faculty and staff have donated items such as fruit cups, juice, ravioli, cheese crackers, ramen noodles and nuts. Food also is purchased with funds from a $10,000 Bank of America grant.
The Brown Bag Cafe has been operating for more than a year. It’s named after a similar program on the Meramec campus.
“Because we have been blessed with so much food through the Bank of America grant, we haven’t had to go out and solicit a lot of food,” said Tamala Turner, program director at Forest Park. “We’ve had enough.”
The pantry operates from 8 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays in Room 215 of the Student Center. Students can go to Room 213 and ask Turner to unlock the door.
Turner isn’t sure how many students have benefited from the Forest Park program, but there have been 634 “encounters” or visits by students who sometimes return.
“A lot of students don’t know about the program,” said volunteer Christopher Brooks, who also is a reporter for The Scene.
Brooks said he and Turner have been putting up fliers around campus and trying to spread the word, hoping more students will take advantage of the program.
Sky-Lar Tate, an administrative assistant on the Meramec campus, is a former beneficiary of its Brown Bag Cafe. She now helps operate it with Bella Hafezi, coordinator for the student assistance program.
“The Brown Bag Cafe is a great program,” Tate said. “It really helped, especially me, as a student. I started here in 2013, and I was really hungry on campus, (and) somebody introduced me to the Brown Bag Cafe. It really changed my life, instead of going to class hungry.”
Hafezi said a Meramec student first came up with the food-pantry idea in the fall of 2012. Students were surveyed to verify there was a need. The first Brown Bag Cafe opened the following year.
The Brown Bag Cafe at Meramec accepts non-perishable and perishable items because it has a refrigerator and microwave. The food pantry’s space at Forest Park is much smaller.
Sometimes Turner gets fresh vegetables from the biology department, which grows them in its greenhouse, but they have to be distributed quickly.
“There’s two different ways we donate food,” said Angela NewMyer, associate professor of biology. “One is through the donations of single-serve quick meals, like cups of mac and cheese or soup. We also donate food in the form of fresh produce.”