Fighting Food Insecurity by Sharing Excess

JENNIFER SCHU

“Everyone should have access to the basic resources they need to live happy and healthy lives.” —LIDYA NANSANJA

On a fall afternoon, sunlight streams onto tables piled with fresh fruits and vegetables in the Academic Building café. It’s Delaware County Community College’s own “produce pop-up,” offered on the Marple Campus at no cost to students. An event held each month during the academic year, it is the brainchild of students Carolina Escobar and Lidya Nansanja, who are both Science for Health Professions majors.

Once a month, student volunteers led by Carolina and Lidya drive to the Philadelphia Wholesale Produce Market in South Philadelphia, pile pallets of fruits and vegetables into their cars, and unload their haul back on campus. Thanks to Escobar and Nansanja, the College has the distinction of being the only community college to have a chapter of Sharing Excess, a nonprofit that rescues surplus perishable food and makes it available to communities in need.

It all started with the goal of meeting a need for their fellow students. “Everyone should have access to the basic resources they need to live happy and healthy lives,” Nansanja says.

As peer mentors at the College, Escobar and Nansanja volunteer with the College’s Student Resource Center, which since 2020 has provided a food pantry stocked with food, toiletries, school supplies and more. The pantry offered students meats and dry and canned goods on a regular basis, but Escobar and Nansanja wanted to try to take it a step further. They sought a way to provide fresh fruits and vegetables to their fellow students on a consistent basis.

It was something they were already doing by helping Dr. Kendrick Mickens, director of Student Outreach and Support, on an informal, case-by-case basis. Carolina and Lidya wanted to continue to provide fresh produce to the school community but on a more regular basis, through an established student-led club or chapter at the College.

It was quite a task for two students who were already juggling a lot. “Fresh produce has to be distributed on the same day, and it can’t be stored, which is a challenge,” Escobar says. The two approached Dr. Mickens with their idea. He advised them to come up with a proposal for a chapter and gather the members and the paperwork required to start a club at the College. He also connected them with his contacts at Sharing Excess, to whom they proposed the creation of a chapter at DCCC.

The students worked on drawing up a chapter constitution with Allyson Gleason, director of Athletics and Campus Engagement. They selected club officers, recruited members, obtained the approval of the committee of Student Affairs at the College, set up pick-up times, and more. “The organizing, communication and time management skills I gained during my involvement with starting the Sharing Excess chapter will be very helpful to me in the future,” Nansanja says.

Their first DCCC Sharing Excess produce pop-up was held in the spring of 2023, and it was an immediate hit with the College community. Now, once a month, students can pick up bags and boxes of fresh mangoes, oranges, bananas, tomatoes, lettuces and more at no cost and take them home to their families.

“It’s been satisfying to hear how much people like the produce and how they plan to prepare it,” Escobar says. “It is healthy, it saves people money, it helps them save time grocery shopping, and it prevents perfectly good excess produce from being thrown away.”Escobar and Nansanja plan to take it even further. Says Nansanja: “Our chapter’s goal is to improve food security not just at our college and the different locations, but in the surrounding communities as well.”