About the Food Pantry
The Food Pantry was formed as a collaborative effort between the Sociology Club and the Polytechnic United Methodist Church. It is designed to serve all members of the Texas Wesleyan community — students, staff, and faculty. We aim to provide food for all Wesleyan community regardless of financial status. If you forgot your breakfast, lunch, or dinner or need a snack to keep up your energy for lectures, swing by the Food Pantry and we will be happy to provide snacks.
Accessing the Food Pantry
The Food Pantry is located on the first floor of PUMC, behind the stairwell. Just look down and follow the signs once you enter the building.
We do ask you to fill out a form the first time you use the Food Pantry. Thereafter you are just required to sign your name and provide your Wesleyan ID. There are no nefarious reasons for doing this. It helps us determine who is using the pantry, how many people may be in your family, the area you live, etc. We are aware that we are in a food desert here in the 76105 zip code and so this information helps us know how useful the Food Pantry is for our Wesleyan community.
DonationsIf you would like to donate to the Food Pantry, we accept checks. We also accept unopened food and toiletry items. At the moment, we are limited to canned food, dried food and packaged shelf-stable items. As more people use the Food Pantry, we hope to be able to include fresh produce, as we do have two refrigerators.
The Food Pantry is run by volunteer students and overseen by Dr. Simons. Each semester, we have an intern, usually from the Sociology Department, who runs and manages the Food Pantry. We ask students to consider donating just one hour per week on a regular basis so that we can create a schedule for the semester and lets students know when we are open. A sign is placed outside of the main PUMC doors to let people know that we are open.
Student organizations may like to consider blocking off an hour or two each week to provide volunteers from their organization to fulfill their own service hour requirements.
If you would like to volunteer, please call or email Dr. Alison Simons at 817-531-4908 or at asimons@txwes.edu.
The Food Pantry was initially set up in response to a need to provide food for students who could not afford it. A collaboration was formed between Texas Wesleyan and the Polytechnic United Methodist Church.
In 2017, we opened the Food Pantry in the Fellowship Hall Kitchen. The Student Government Organization donated $3,000 to help buy food at the end of the spring semester.
Unfortunately, events occurring in the Fellowship Hall made the kitchen inaccessible to students at various times, The Church kindly donated the larger separate room where we are now — Room 133, behind the stairwell. Over the summer, faculty cleaned the room and a local high school student organization came in to paint, Bookcases were sourced and cleaned, and the process of moving into the new space began.
We were up and running at the beginning of the Fall 2017 semester.