By Josh Siatkowski | Staff Writer
Heading into the 2025-2026 school year, The Store is loaded with new support and strategies for fighting food insecurity on campus.
The Store, Baylor’s campus food pantry located in the Paul L. Foster Success Center of Sid Richardson, will introduce an arsenal of improved programs this year. Alongside continuing to supply students with fresh food and basic products, The Store will add to its selection of special diet foods, implement an online shopping system and begin a marketing campaign to encourage students to donate to the Store through donated money, food items or meal swipes.
A student government initiative led to a $15,000 university gift to The Store in May 2025, which will help fund the new programming. The Store currently serves about 1,100 students per week, but has been limited by its own resources.
Tre Baldwin, assistant director of basic needs at Baylor’s Student Opportunity and Achievement Resources Office, said when he was approached by 2024-2025 Student Body President Lily Davis earlier last year, the original goal was just to keep up with demand.
“When [Davis] presented this idea to me, it was just trying to get more food on the shelves because we stock the store on Wednesdays, and it’s gone on Wednesday,” Baldwin said.
But as Baldwin and Davis planned for The Store’s future, the initiative became much more than just keeping food on the shelves, turning into what Baldwin called “meet[ing] food insecurities at a different level.”
For Baldwin, ideas for improved programming came from his experience serving as the chair of the Big 12 Food Pantry Alliance. Davis, who focused more on student engagement with The Store, said she was inspired by fellow student government members at different universities.
“I met with Big 12 student government leaders last fall, and they explained to me that their food pantries on campus were in dire need of extra support donation-wise,” Davis said. “This sparked a conversation and idea in my mind when I came into the role of student body president.”
Through these conversations, the university gift will add more fresh bread, eggs, milk and other basics to The Store, while increasing the availability of more specialized items.
Baylor has committed an additional $5,000 per year to help sustain the program, but much of the long-term impact of The Store is up to student participation.
“Our hope is to turn this into something more sustainable and have students give back,” Davis said. “As we go into next year, our hope is to create an incentive or an educational campaign for students to also learn about the food-insecure population, the resources available to them and then be incentivized to give, whether that’s monetarily, through meal swipes or through donated goods.”
Baldwin said he hopes the increased student engagement can help destigmatize the use of food pantries, along with improving The Store’s services.
“Everybody has a negative connotation when you talk about food pantry, but we just want to enlighten what that looks like,” Baldwin said.
The Store is open from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Friday. Students interested in using The Store’s services can apply through the intake form, while volunteers can sign up here.
