Crimson and Gold Connection; Danielle Walker

Our guest this week is the founder of the Gorilla Assistance Pantry and also a recent Pittsburgh State University graduate, Danielle Walker. Danielle, thanks for joining us and also congratulations on your graduation. What did you enjoy about being at Pittsburgh State University for the last few years? Definitely the football team. That was one of my main criteria when I picked what college I wanted to go to. I wanted to school to have a good football team and a good sports atmosphere. I also really enjoy the theater department here on campus as well as I'm just kind of like the faculty relationships. I love how approachable our president of the university is. What kind of organizational involvement do you have on campus? Mostly leadership organizations, things like student masters, student government, peers, help, lots of things like that soccer club outside of the leadership realm. You are the founder of the Gorilla Assistance Pantry, which is new here on campus. Can you explain what that is? I got it start in a leadership seminar class that I took for my minor, where we had to do a hypothetical project. And throughout the semester, we were working on the project.

And I just remember me and my partner kind of looked at each other like we could make this a reality on campus. Our focus was campus hunger, and that was what we were trying to stall during the semester. So it was really helpful to have Dr. Irwin as my professor for that class too, kind of I think helped jumpstart the process because being the associate vice president for campus life, he had a chance to see firsthand the research that went into the project. And basically what the Gorilla Assistance Pantry is now is a food pantry that's open to students, staff, and faculty of PSU. You basically have to have an ID number to use it. I mean, you can come in and you can get free food. We try to give you enough to last about a three-day period. And we operate all on donations and volunteer work. So it's a really cool service, especially since it's going free of charge to the university. What was the process like for getting the Gorilla Assistance Pantry to become a reality so quickly? Well, like I said, Dr. Irwin was my professor, so that helped out a lot. And just working on it at the end of the semester, I actually just walked into Dr. Scott's office and was like, I have an idea for campus.

And I think we would benefit. And he just kind of laughed. And he was like, I just read an article over this yesterday. He printed the article off about another campus in the area that has I'm a food pantry and gave it to me to read. And he told me to type up a proposal and he would take it to the president's council. And so I typed it up as fast I could and sent it in. And the president's council backed in. They're like, I think this is a great idea. Let's move forward. And so from that point, it was just kind of monthly meetings with facility planners and Dr. Irwin and all these people to try to figure out the best location on campus, how it was going to operate, working with OIS to get a tracking system up, things like that. So it was just an amazingly fast process. What other groups or organizations on campus are in the community have helped out with this? Multiple organizations have done food drives for us. The fraternity, Pikeappa Alpha was actually the first one. They did one before we even opened our doors. So it kind of gave us a startup to get going. We've had several community members call in and donate cash to us, things anywhere ranging from $100 to $500 donations, which has been great.

So Dexo on campus has become a huge partner with us. They donated $4,000 to the project to help us buy freezers and things like that to be able to store outside of perishable foods so we can try to stock meat products. This seems almost every department at this point has tried to do something for us, which has been really amazing. When is the pantry open and where is it located? It's located in 3, 10 Whitesit and it's open on Mondays and Thursdays from 9 to 3. Have there been any difficulties with this so far? I think the biggest difficulty is trying to get volunteers to staff it and making sure they show up for their shifts. Someone has car trouble or sick, it's really hard to try to find someone to fill in for them. The other big difficulty, I think, would probably just be getting the word out there. We want to spend minimal amount on advertising because we want to be able to put as much as we get into food and services like that. So we're really relying on word of mouth at this point and just getting students to realize that it is a free service and you don't have to prove that your need to come in. It's an honor system.

So that's kind of been a challenge to get that type of word out there. What is the process when a student or a faculty member comes in with their card to get the food? Pretty simple. Basically they come in, if it's their first, we ask them if it's their first time. If it is, they fill out a really short piece of paper just so we can have some sort of record to show the university no names or ever used. It's just ID numbered. And then they just thought the little sheet of paper and we have a sheet of what's in stock at that time and they can put little X's back next to the food products they'd like. Then our volunteer goes into the back, bags it up and then hands it to the student. They can be on their way. What are the current short-term goals for the pantry? Short-term goals are definitely, we're trying to develop like 10 to 15 pre-packaged meals that we can hand in. And so instead of coming in and getting like a can of soup, you can come in and say, I want the stuff to make like a casserole and we would have everything pre-made. And so we're really trying to get people to focus when they donate to us that we have this set of meals that we're trying to put together

and they could donate the items that go into those meals. That would be really beneficial for us. The other short-term goal is, we're hoping that we can get the university to put this into their master plan and maybe eventually build a space specifically for the pantry. What are some long-term goals that might go along with that as well? A long-term goal, it kind of is getting a space on campus specifically for it. But we'd really like to see partnering with more organizations and we really want to partner more with like the Wesley House and stuff. We don't want to take donations away from the Wesley House and so we're trying to keep that a good balance. What can someone do to become involved in various aspects of the pantry? They can either contact the soon-to-be president, Brian Walker, or they can just email pitstategap at gmail.com and say that they're interested. And we can start working if they're interested in volunteering or donating or wanting to do a food drive or something, we're open to any sort of donations. And then if community members are wanting to donate, they can either bring in donations to the food pantry.

We also have a drop-off location in the library that they can just drop off if the pantry's not open the day that they want to donate or if they're wanting to donate the monetary thing and they just contact the development office. What types of things are you looking for people to donate to the pantry? Basically what I try to tell people is think of something that a college student would eat. College students typically, we want to focus on healthy food but we also don't want to have 80 cans of spinach that no one's ever going to want to eat. We're looking for those types of foods, definitely fresh fruits and vegetables would be amazing. Those are harder to go purchase on a regular basis, meet products. We're also looking for things like toiletries which people a lot of times leave out things like deodorant, toothpaste, shampoo, conditioner because a lot of times the students probably can't afford food. They're probably struggling with those basic necessities as well. And finally, what would your advice be to someone who might be on the fence about assisting the gorilla assistance pantry? We really just want to encourage people to keep us in mind not only around the holiday is but definitely next semester

and even into this time next year, we don't want this to become a fad that everyone's really excited about wants to donate to because it's just open and then kind of forget about as the years go by. Our guest today has been the founder of the gorilla assistance pantry, Danielle Walker.