Twenty-one-thousand-five-hundred pounds: That’s how much food Northwestern Michigan College (NMC) has distributed in just one semester through its newly launched mobile food pantry. The number will grow by 5,200 pounds tomorrow (Monday), when Cathy Warner, the NMC English professor who organizes the program, hosts another two-hour distribution session at the Maple Lot on the college’s main campus. It’s a big impact, especially considering that the program wouldn’t exist had it not been for a student’s fall 2023 research project.

In recent years, NMC has put a big emphasis on experiential learning. Warner embraced the shift five years ago, reimagining some of her English courses so they would “focus more on a project-based learning model.”

“We identify a problem in the community, or a challenge at the college, or something that needs improvement,” Warner tells The Ticker. “Students look around and say, ‘Hey, here's something I've noticed that I think we could better.’ Then we work through the research process to identify the root causes of the problem, and to figure out how other people are addressing this issue. The students take all that information and develop a proposal to present at the end of the semester as a capstone project.”

During the fall 2023 semester, one of Warner’s students took on the issue of food insecurity.

“I had a student named Ava Serrano, and she talked to the class about how once you start to see things that are usually invisible – like hunger and food insecurity – you just see them everywhere,” Warner says. “I remember her saying, ‘I notice all the time that my classmates are hungry. I can hear their stomachs grumbling in class.’”

Serrano ended up writing a proposal for the relaunch of the mobile food pantry, a program NMC had previously tried for a single semester.

The college has had a stationary food pantry since 2017, situated indoors at NMC’s Osterlin Building and distributing toiletries and nonperishable foods (think cereal, pasta, peanut butter, and canned goods) on a self-serve basis. According to NMC Communications Manager Cari Noga, that resource has served 184 people per month this academic year.

“For the first four years, [the stationary food pantry] consistently served an average of 90 people per month,” Noga says. “Then it began to climb, serving an average of 102 people per month during the 2020-21 academic year.” The program hit its peak (so far) in November 2022, with 339 people served.

The mobile pantry, which initially ran during the spring 2023 semester, was intended to increase the visibility of NMC’s food distribution efforts and to diversify offerings. The mobile pantry was pitched as something like a farmers market, operating outdoors in an NMC parking lot and focusing on fresh fruits and vegetables, dairy products, and baked books.

But while the stationary pantry’s climbing numbers seemed to indicate a rising issue with food security on NMC’s campus, the mobile pantry underperformed.

“It just wasn't really well attended by NMC students,” Warner says. “What Ava did in her proposal was to come back around to that concept and say, ‘I think there are better ways we could have done this.’”

Serrano suggested changing the program from a monthly distribution to an every-other-week offering. More frequency, she argued, would be superior for addressing the needs of her fellow students. Serrano also proposed tweaks to how NMC was marketing the mobile food pantry, emphasizing how students could use the service to help with other financial needs – as in, “If we give you groceries, you can use your grocery budget to cover other expenses.”

With the right push, Serrano estimated that a $15,000-per-year budget could provide more than 8,000 pounds of fresh foods to students, adding a collective value of approximately $300,000 to student budgets.

The proposal caught the eye of the Oleson Foundation, which put up the $15,000 to fund the mobile pantry for a year. Warner took the lead from there, arranging a partnership with Feeding America – which supplies the food – and marshalling volunteers from her classes, NMC’s faculty and staff, and even local Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts troops to make the bimonthly distributions a reality.

So far, the mobile pantry has held five food distributions this semester, with a sixth scheduled for 3-5pm tomorrow and a seventh slotted for the same time on Monday, December 2. The first five have distributed 21,496 pounds of food, with each serving an average of 231 individuals across 83 households. While the service is open to anyone in the community – they don’t need to be NMC students or even have a tie to the college – Warner says over 70 percent of participants are from “college-affiliated households." Many of those are families, with children accounting for approximately one-third of the individuals that the program has served so far.

“Sometimes, as we're loading up a car, a mom will wipe off an apple and hand it to her kid that sits sitting in the backseat,” Warner says. “Kids in our community are hungry; families are hungry; our students are hungry. I really feel like we're meeting in need that has always been there, it's just always kind of been invisible.”

The mobile pantry is funded through the end of the 2024-25 academic year, and Warner has seven distributions scheduled for spring semester, on January 20, February 3 and 24, March 3 and 17, and April 7 and 21. All distributions occur on Mondays from 3-5pm at the Maple Lot. Warner estimates the program will have distributed “upwards of 300,000 pounds of fresh foods” this school year when all is said and done, with NMC only paying about $875 out of pocket to stage each distribution.

Beyond next semester, Warner is hopeful NMC can find funding to make the mobile food pantry a permanent service.

“I foresee this program growing the more students realize it's there,” she says.