Tucked away beside The Nosh is the Triton Pantry, run by UMSL’s Student Advocacy and Care team. Shannon Quinn, the Student Care and Advocacy case manager, oversees the pantry. She has been working with the Triton Pantry since she was a student at UMSL, and after graduating, she made it her career path. She was ecstatic to share her knowledge and story with the pantry.

The Triton Pantry’s operational hours are 10 am to 6 pm Monday through Thursday and 10 am to 2 pm Friday throughout the regular school year with summer hours being 10 am to 4 pm Monday through Thursday. Any and all students are welcome to come in and grab what they need, no questions asked, as long as they bring with them their student ID or can be looked up through Triton Connect. Students can come in as much as necessary to supply their needs.

The supplies the pantry receives come from the Saint Louis Area Diaper Bank, Saint Louis Area Foodbank and Operation Food Search. These partnerships, with Operation Food Search being the most recent addition, send the pantry canned goods, snacks, fresher foods, diapers and personal hygiene supplies for students.

Quinn is constantly looking for new partnerships because the pantry is, “at the mercy of the food banks”. While they do get to choose from a selection, it can be limited at times. The Triton Pantry strives to help students thrive rather than survive. The pantry tries to get “unnecessary” snacks such as Oreos and chips because it helps destigmatize going to a food pantry. The student workers and Quinn have worked hard to make the pantry as welcoming as they can, so students in need feel comfortable coming in.

The food pantry officially opened in 2018 and during its early days, the open hours were much more limited, but with the high demand of students coming in, the Student Care and Advocacy team decided to keep the pantry open longer and more often. Now, the pantry sees on average 30-50 students a day.

Quinn has been a part of the Triton Pantry since the Spring of 2020 and has seen the project grow exponentially since she started as a student-worker. Now as a case worker and overseeing the pantry, she is in charge of creating new opportunities for it to grow.

One of the newer projects Quinn told me about was a shelf sponsorship program. Any department, faculty, or staff can sponsor a shelf in the Triton Pantry for a month. Quinn has received multiple inquiries about the program for this semester alone. The sponsorship helps bring awareness to the program by promoting the different departments and branches of UMSL. If you are interested in knowing more about this program, please email Shannon Quinn.

On top of this new program beginning, there will be a new satellite location of the Triton Pantry opening in the Nursing Administration Building on South Campus. The new location will have its own, separate staff and operational hours, but the main pantry location will be providing the food and supplies. When I spoke with Quinn, the opening date for the new location was set for September 4.

Quinn is extremely passionate about having accessible resources for all college students. She states, “All of us can agree that nobody should go hungry… We look at the K-12 school system and everybody agrees that free and reduced lunch should be an option for those children because we all agree they shouldn’t be hungry; the same goes for college students! They’re just going from one institution over to the next and the same should apply.”

The urge for accessibility is why the pantry is does not discriminate when it comes to the students’ financial situations. Whether someone needs to use the pantry once or has to come in multiple times a week, the pantry is there to help ease food insecurity.

For those looking to get involved with Triton Pantry, contact Shannon Quinn for questions about volunteering or the Federal Work-Study program.