With food insecurity a growing issue for students, Western Sydney University has officially launched Western Pantry – a new food hub exclusively at its Kingswood campus offering staples free of charge.
According to Student Community Program Coordinator Miranda Zhang, the concept was building off of existing initiatives and programs run across all Western Sydney University campuses.
“Over the years, the SRCs on each campus have facilitated small pantries, but they didn’t really have proper supervision. They have been popular, though, so we’ve had it in our minds that we wanted to do a larger scale one for quite a while,” she said.
“We’ve also got a community dinner program that we run where we do a free cooked meal with staff, students and community partners once a week across all of our main campuses, and we do a free breakfast program as well with a cooked breakfast once a week and a cold breakfast bar roughly three days a week, and we thought that this was the obvious next step.”
As far as which campus the pantry would be placed in, Zhang noted that location was key when selecting Kingswood.
“It used to be an old book store, so it’s already sort of set up like a shopfront which was the vibe that we were going for,” she said.
“It’s got the glass all around, the sliding doors, and it’s in a relatively good location on the campus as well.”
Western Pantry will initially be open on Monday afternoons and Wednesday mornings, enabling students to come in and ‘shop’ items including pantry staples and fresh produce.
“Students can grab up to five items from the pantry staples, so for example, you could grab a longlife milk, some instant noodles, either some pasta sauce or maybe some peanut butter, some pasta, then maybe a tea or coffee or snack, then we also have unlimited hygiene products and fresh produce,” Zhang said.
Tobey Lingayo, who works in the Student Community Program’s team as a Community Meals Assistant and has been working shifts at the pantry, said that it has been a huge success so far.
“The Monday was really busy and had a really good turn out. We hit around 120 people coming in, which we are quite happy about,” he said.
“We’re hoping that we’ll continue to gain momentum and have even more people, but so far reception has been really happy and really positive.”
Ultimately, he said the goal was to make sure everyone has access to fresh and nutritious food.
“Food is really expensive nowadays, and all we’re doing is hoping that we can eliminate some of the food insecurity happening, and ensure that no one will have to go to sleep hungry,” he said.
Zhang said that with this in mind, she’s looking forward to taking opportunities to expand Western Pantry not only across other campuses, but also internally.
“I think there’s a lot of opportunity there to build food skills in students. We’ve got a lot of international students and we’ve got the residents up at the village, so there are a lot of students living on campus, and there’s lots of opportunity to hold cooking classes inside the pantry maybe,” she said.
“We’ve got the fruits and vegetables coming through, lots of different varieties, and some are kind of uncommon, so we’re thinking of doing some recipes online as well on how you can utilise that.”
Currently, produce for Western Pantry is being sourced from Good & Fugly, with more coming through from local farms.
Cassidy Pearce
Cassidy Pearce is a news and entertainment journalist with The Western Weekender. A graduate of the University of Technology Sydney, she has previously worked with Good Morning Macarthur and joined the Weekender in 2022.