Yes, Penn State University provides many different interventions to prevent or alleviate hunger among staff. For example:

The Food Support and Basic Resources website offers a range of resources. Hosted by Student Affairs, the resources include campus, community, and national resource links such as:

• The food pantries on all campuses are dedicated to supporting food insecure people on campus. A listing can be found on the Food Support and Basic Resources website.
• The Lion’s Pantry is available to anyone with a Penn State ID (university faculty and staff as well as currently enrolled students).
• Connections to a nearby food bank:
  • Feeding America: provides a list of food banks that support food insecurity nationwide.
  • Pennsylvania food banks by county (PDF)

There is a Thanksgiving Basket Drive annually for “local families” which may include employees.

In addition to resources, Penn State has contributed to knowledge about food insecurity. For example:

• December, 2024 – Food insecurity and health-related quality of life among a nationally representative sample of older adults: cross-sectional analysis evaluated the associations between food security and multiple outcomes related to health-related quality of life.
• August, 2024 – Food Insecurity, Vision Impairment, and Longitudinal Risk of Frailty and Falls in The National Health and Aging Trends Study studied how food insecurity and vision impairment, which are linked, have been independently associated with frailty and falls to understand how they may together contribute to frailty and fall risk could improve insight into these growing public health challenges.
• April, 2024 – Infrastructuring Community Fridges for Food Commoning explored how the Community Fridge movement combats food insecurity and food waste. It consists of local community members sharing surplus food with neighbors via a shared refrigerator placed on a sidewalk. The study examined how community fridges practice information, human, and social infrastructuring work, as well as how their core values shaped norms for managing refrigerators and surplus food as the commons in local communities.

 

Learn more about Penn State’s progress towards the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals HERE and on SDG 2 HERE.