News

Food power — Black Bear Exchange helps hungry

By Kaitlynn Perreault

Posted on Oct. 22, 2009, at 3:39 a.m.

The University of Maine is home to a food pantry inspired by innovation and a desire to help others.

During the biggest snowstorm of 2008, many people stayed inside to avoid the dangerous weather. It didn’t stop Robin Arnold, President of the Classified Employee Advisory Committee (CEAC), and Bodwell Center’s Craig DeForest from going to the grocery store. Four hours and four shopping carts later, they had the food they needed to support their cause. The food would supply their “holiday dinner for a dollar,” which they planned to use to kick off the Black Bear Exchange food cupboard.

Arnold and other committee members sold tickets around campus. The evening of the dinner they donated five Christmas dinners with all the works: Gourmet pies, potatoes and meats. This fed 22 families and raised $700 to put toward the start of the cupboard, which Arnold said the public needed.

“I hear people saying they don’t have any heat in their house. I hear people saying, ‘Well I didn’t eat supper last night,’ or ‘Kids need breakfast — things like that,” Arnold said. “So we thought about perhaps seeing if the campus would let us have a food cupboard.”

The CEAC found a location at the old farm store on campus near MaineBound. Arnold decided to get University of Maine students involved.

“The school of social work has a graduate student who goes in and runs the cupboard as her internship,” Arnold said. “I thought it was important for the cupboard to have that education component for sustainability, because if we have an internship there every year then somebody is always going to be there to run it.”

Lauren Cappuccio, employee of the Bodwell Center and volunteer at the cupboard, said they run it like a grocery store and plan to keep it that way.

“Everyone is really friendly and we all just act like it’s a normal grocery store,” Cappuccio said.

Cappuccio and Arnold said the best and most comforting part to the cupboard is that shopping there is completely confidential. Upon entering, the people receive a number. They are under no obligation to tell anyone their name or contact information.

“A lot of people in their local communities have a town office. At their town office you can go get assistance by maybe getting free fire wood, maybe some food or you might be able to get some oil or whatever,” Arnold said. “Although then, when you go to your town office, everybody in your town knows it. There’s no, for example, cloak of confidentiality. So a lot of people won’t go and do it because they don’t want people talking about them.”

Arnold explained this was the reason they sought out the Bodwell Center for assistance in the project. Students working at the Black Bear Exchange wouldn’t know if customers were students, faculty or community members. This would help erase some of the social stigma.

With this confidentiality, the shopper is given a number, takes a grocery bag and chooses no more than 15 items. After they choose their items, they check out, meaning they notify the staff person before they leave to write down what items they chose and the shopper’s number. This process, according to Cappuccio, helps the cupboard to keep inventory of their items.

“We like to try to keep inventory so we know what’s coming in and what’s going out, this way we know what people take a lot of,” Cappuccio said. “We do get a lot of money donations sometimes, and all the profits from that go toward buying food. So whatever people are taking a lot of and we’re running low on, we buy more of that.”

Cappuccio knows that the 15 items per customer limit is in some ways a small disadvantage, but even those 15 items can help the community.

“We want to make sure everybody has healthy food and enough to eat and so they can do well in school, work or whatever else they are doing; because we definitely work with the community and we want to help feed everyone,” Cappuccio said.

Most of the donations come from food drives run by the center. Events have included the holiday dinner and their recent “fill the bus” food drive on homecoming weekend.

“It’s not necessarily meant to be their sole source of food,” Arnold said, “but for some it may be.”

Plans are underway to keep the food cupboard open more. Their current hours are Wednesdays from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. and Thursdays from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 22nd, 2009, 3:39 am. You can follow any responses to this article through the RSS feed.