Campus Food Access
The Wesley Center strives to serve the common good for all Hamline students. As part of this mission, we are pioneering initiatives to ensure all Hamline students have access to affordable, culturally appropriate, and nutritious foods. There are a number of resources on campus available to students as made possible through committed community partners, the Feed Your Brain student group, and the Campus Food Access AmeriCorps VISTA.
Hamline Food Resource Center (FRC)
Formerly known as the "pop-up pantry," the Food Resource Center is located in West Hall 110. There, students can find free, nutritious, and culturally specific food and household items. No "proof of need" is required to take advantage of this resource and using the FRC is like using the library or gym. Students can find information about SNAP benefits, community pantries, and other information about food/basic needs resources on the Food Resource Center's Google site or in-person at the FRC.
Contact the FRC: foodaccess@hamline.edu.
To ensure that donations go entirely to Food Resource Center, please include a note in the "other" section, under the "designation field" of the donation form and write in: "For Food Resource Center."
Food resource history
At a teach-in in February 2017, students expressed concerns they had and barriers they were facing in accessing abundant, healthy food on and off campus. These comments sparked a small group of students, including the then current Campus Food Access AmeriCorps VISTA, Emma Kiley, to look into food insecurity on Hamline's campus. This group, along with some faculty and staff, sent out a survey to all undergraduate students attending Hamline in the 2016–2017 academic year. Of the nearly 360 students who responded, 70% noted that they could not afford to eat nutritionally balanced meals, 50% of respondents said they cut or skipped meals to stretch their food budget, and nearly 70% noted that they had difficulty paying their rent.
These results led to the creation of the Feed Your Brain Campaign as an initiative to educate about food insecurity at Hamline while simultaneously working to create the Hamline Food Resource Center. Feed Your Brain was founded in the Spring of 2017, and worked with Hamline administration, campus leaders, and community members to establish a Food Resource Center on campus, which opened as a permanent fixture in the fall of 2019.