Story and photo
by PARKER BROCK
Pima Community College is building the Aztec Resource Center and Food Bank and everybody is getting on board.
The ARC is a student-driven initiative to provide more for students in need and is located at the West and Desert Vista campuses.
The initiative is headed by Rachael Lord, adviser for the Student Social Services organization at West Campus, and Donald Harp at Desert Vista Campus. Social services students have supported the project for the past year. They have been collecting food and going to community members asking for donations.
The project is working to receive ServSafe food bank certification, which is needed to distribute goods from the food bank, as transporting, storing and distributing food and donations isn’t a simple process. Food that may be non-perishable can be temperature sensitive, and other perishable donations must be watched to ensure that tainted food isn’t distributed.
After passing certification, which they recently attained for both campuses, ARC can receive donations directly from the Community Food Bank of Southern Arizona.
They’re not in this alone, because the Pima Community College Foundation has granted a start-up fund of $1,000 to help establish infrastructure such as phone and data lines for students to use while working at the pantry. The initiative even has received furniture from recently sold Community Campus.
This isn’t the first time Pima has tried establishing this sort of program. Smaller individual pantries had tried to get up and running at other campuses like East and Downtown, but were not sustainable without support from the Community Food Bank.
“It had been trying to get off the ground for several years but was running into roadblocks with the Community Food Bank and PCC not being able to figure out how to make it work,” Lord said. “I was asked to take it on as a student project last February. We started doing grassroots work.”
Lord is working with students handling the administrative procedures required for the project. Interested students will require food bank training in order to volunteer, with 19 students having been trained so far.
“We are also working with PTK Honors and the Student Senate to really make sure we’re getting everyone involved,” Lord said. “We will be looking for more volunteers as we get going, but it is a process.”
The ARC Food pantry had its soft-opening on March 28, with West Campus initial hours being from 11:30 a.m.-2 p.m. Mondays and Wednesdays and Desert Vista from 3-6 p.m.
“The real big driver for this is that there are so many students on board,” Harp said.
Harp had been trying to start a center similar to the work being done by Lord. Then after hearing about her efforts as well as the student senate voting to have the ARC Food Bank be their mission for the academic year, they teamed up to make the project a reality.
“It’s all for the students, by the students’ initiative,” Harp said. “We are just here to help them weave through college policies and procedures, because it is a big institution and we have to be safe and compliant.”
The ARC Food Pantry had student momentum and didn’t face resistance by the institution. However, there were issues finding space for it because of current construction and facility reorganizing.
“It interfered just because no one was really clear on which spaces were claimed or not claimed, that caused a bit of “‘Where are we going,’ ” Lord said.
While these developments are Pima’s path to modernization and a necessary progression, it has caused unintentional interference.
“Again, there was no resistance,” Harp said. “It was complete chaos, moving parts all over the place all at the same time. I feel like we’re pretty lucky to have gotten it done so quickly, with everything the college has going on, but there are a lot of people at the college who believe in this.”
The ARC teamed with Pima’s counseling center.
“We’ll be able to if we have a student in need of specific like transportation, we can partner with counseling to have day passes for busses,” Lord said.
By teaming with counseling, they hope to be able to help get students the support they need.
They also hope to work with the Pima foundation to get needs-based funding opportunities, like an account for students who are housing or transportation insecure.
With help from Pima, they sent surveys to students in need to anonymously determine their needs and to have data to help guide aid.
“When we do write grants and say, ‘Hey we need this, we need to have this type of information moving forward,’ ” Lord said.
They plan to stick around, continuing hours until the end of the semester with the West Campus pantry remaining open into the summer; the hours for which will be posted toward the end of the semester around campus.
“Our biggest challenge is going to be getting people to know we are open, when we’re open and where we are on both campuses.”