Humans of St. Norbert:

“A few months ago, Neale Tracy from The Equality Project reached out to me because I am the co-president of the Oxfam America [student org on campus]. We are a social justice organization that focuses on the eradication of poverty so, given this focus, Neale asked if we were interested in participating in the Little Food Library initiative.

“There is a growing body of research that is showing the prevalence of food insecurity on college campuses. To be honest, prior to Neale reaching out, I didn’t have much of an awareness of that so it’s definitely been a learning opportunity for me and an enriching one at that. Being able to learn more and apply it to our campus community has been really rewarding. We’ve just started with this initiative in the last few weeks kinda getting it going here in the library and what better environment to do that because libraries are a source of knowledge. They not only nourish students’ intellectual abilities but they can contribute to nourishing the physical aspects of that. Any way we can help the campus community, especially students during COVID time and just in general, to alleviate that financial burden a little bit is one of our main goals with this initiative.

“It’s an initiative by students for students. Members of the campus community can drop off donations or if they are in need of food, they can just come and grab maybe a can of beans or a box of macaroni and cheese. Just whatever they need, no questions asked. We don’t have anyone standing there monitoring who takes what.

“[My favorite part has been] just seeing it from beginning to end. I plan on staying in contact with the group [after I graduate] and it will be interesting to see how it evolves over the next few years. It’s really cool to be able to just plan it, get it off the ground and just see how it will develop.” – Cami Wendricks ’21