In my pathway I want to explore things that Utah Valley University is doing to encourage Community Engaged Learning and Research. I am a transfer student who started college a little later in life, and one of the many reasons I stay at UVU is because of all the hands-on, engaged learning opportunities on campus. Being able to focus my research on UVU has been enlightening.
This month the main question driving my post was:How does participation in community engaged learning projects influence college students' awareness and actions towards food insecurity on their campus and within their community? Throughout my post, I hope that you gain insight into how students who engage with their community care more about their community.
This section summarizes the student’s data-gathering process and key findings from survey, interview, or other inquiry methods.
This month I knew that I was taking a group of students to Tabitha’s Way Food Bank to volunteer, so for my data collection I wanted to see how Community Engaged Learning experience affected people's perspectives surrounding food insecurity. I asked four students to answer nine questions before we volunteered and then nearly identical questions after we volunteered. If you want the raw questions and the students' answers you can view that here.
Here’s what I learned from this experience:
To give more context about what our day looked like, before we went into the food bank I took five minutes to talk about how donating to a food bank works and how it directly affects our community. We then went and sorted food donations for a few hours and during that time I had conversations with the different students about things we noticed while volunteering. Afterwards everyone was tired so I just took a few minutes to hammer home the point that these resources are for everyone, and you don’t need to be “poor enough” to ask for help. There are people and programs in place that assist you in every way possible. I especially brought up the CAREhub, really emphasizing the point that they are there for all students no matter what.
Some things that I noticed about the answers to the questionnaires, was even though all students had a wide range of experiences with food access work, they all shared a common, but limited, understanding of what food insecurity is. Most students could name some food help programs but they are not totally sure how to connect people to them. I would also say that they had a generally low feeling of responsibility for addressing food insecurity, which correlates with how much they talked about this situation with the people in their life.
After the experience, all students reported noticeable growth in both their knowledge and sense of connection to the issue which I was happy about. Understanding what food insecurity really is increased for everyone (including me), most students also experienced a rise in their perceived responsibility to help address food insecurity, with some of them expressing greater motivation to continue volunteering. My friend, student C, said to me while volunteering that they had never done this before, but after the experience they wanted to do this on dates, with their friends, or even just by themself.
Overall, this Community Engaged Learning project showed me how impactful even a short experience can be. By framing our service with intentional conversations I saw how students’ understanding can shift. Their responses confirmed for me that CELR can help build responsibility, care, the importance of equity and access, and we all discovered that helping doesn’t need to be some big or complicated event. We all walked away more informed and genuinely more excited to continue helping.
This section shares insights from a community partner interview, connecting their perspective to the Pathway theme.
As part of my exploration into Community-engaged learning and Research (CELR) I wanted to focus on different systemic issues that we face as community members. This month I wanted to focus on: how CELR influences college students’ awareness, attitudes, and action towards food insecurity. I interviewed Amber McGuire, the Director of UVU’s CAREhub. Her insights provided context for understanding food insecurity on college campuses, but also how CELR shapes students' relationship with it.
Amber McGuire holds a Ph.D. in Ethical Leadership and a Master's in Student Affairs in Higher Education. With over a decade of service at UVU, Amber worked for the Center for Social Impact before becoming the director of the CAREhub and Wee Care Center. She has led initiatives focused on basic needs at UVU and across Utah's higher education landscape, advocating for student well-being and access to essential resources.
The CAREhub’s mission is “[To] foster an inclusive environment for wolverines to access food, housing, health and safety.” McGuire expounded a little bit more by adding that they wanted to create a sense of belonging for students through gaining their foundational needs. She walked me through a little bit about the difference between foundational needs and basic needs; foundational needs, as opposed to basic needs, goes beyond keeping someone alive. Foundational needs are required for students to succeed academically and personally, that would include mental health support and financial resources, but they also include basic needs like food and housing. I bring this up, because it helped me understand that the CAREhub isn’t just trying to keep enrollment up, they are trying to get students to succeed and achieve their goals in every aspect of their lives.
Something that McGuire pointed out to me and said she thought I would love (she was right.) The CAREhub was actually started by a CELR class project. Students saw a gap on campus and worked to fill it. Since then, around 2010-2011, the CAREhub has worked with students in many different ways. A student initiative that I found really interesting was how they have been working with international students to get more culturally diverse foods in the pantry. They noticed that since international students have to work less by law and use the food pantry more as a result, they wanted to have food that they loved as well. According to McGuire, CELR gives students a chance to apply concepts and learning tools to the real world as well as add concrete accomplishments to their resume.
CELR also teaches something deeper, the difference between intent and impact. While working with the Center for Social Impact, as well as working with these different community partners, I’ve become well acquainted with these concepts. Talking with McGuire helped me see how it affects food insecurity. She pointed out food drives, while these are well-intentioned and pretty easy to accomplish, they don’t address the underlying needs. A 640 pound donation raises practical questions for me: Who is going to sort out all the food? Who’s going to distribute all the food? How do people know it’s going to be there? This conversation helped me understand CELR as a whole, when it comes to planning projects to get people involved we need to consider the systemic aspect and the realities of the situation at hand.
Despite increasing need, most students are still unaware of food insecurity and how it affects them. This conversation with McGuire reinforced how important it is to ask for help when you need it, point your friends to people who can help, and stay engaged with your community on every level. There’s no shame in asking for help especially in college, where there are so many resources to cushion your fall, it’s important to take advantage of them. A quote that McGuire said that stuck with me was, “College is for learning about yourself and learning about how the world works. You shouldn’t be worried about your needs.” That level of care and intentionality that she has is resonating from the CAREhub. When we confront stigma, participate in hand-on service, and start examining systemic walls, students become more informed, empowered, safer, and healthier. And that, to me, is what learning, working, and participating in our community is all about - making the world better through understanding and action.
This section summarizes readings and research related to a relevant topic within the student’s Pathway and connects them to larger patterns or themes.
My mom was always against me going with my friends down to Mexico and building schools. I would beg her though. I would tell her that I love service, I want to be with my friends, it would be so fun, and it was for a good cause. My mom, in her infinite wisdom, told me that it wasn't service, it was a photo-op, and she refused to let her children be involved in that scam. It’s important to understand that Community-Engaged Learning and Research is a powerful tool if used correctly. However when it’s not, we might find ourselves taking advantage of people. I wanted to learn more about my mother’s claim that some of these trips aren’t “service” so I went into the research asking myself this question: Are international service trips meaningful, cross-cultural experiences or modern day colonialism?
There are many, many websites that advertise and promise a transformative educational experience, but honestly, what does that mean? What does that look like? According to the company School The World it looks like four things: cultural immersion, learning a language, expanding your horizons and making friends. All of these things, they claim, will make you a better person, and when you return home you’ll be able, “[T]o make a difference in your own community and beyond.” Heartwarming. Right off the bat I see a red flag. This description has been about me the entire time, even if they bring up the people I’ll be serving they say it in a way that still caters to me: “Picture yourself connecting with locals, sharing stories, and laughing together” or “perhaps you’re in Honduras, sharing a meal with a local family…as you learn about their daily lives” These sentences aren’t promoting something inherently bad, but they aren’t promoting service learning.
I did a little deep dive on Google Scholar, and found this research article by BMJ Global Health (2022), which is a research journal. Their study focused on doctors going to lower income countries “so the students can ‘experience global health’”(pg. 1). BMJ calls this global health tourism. This concept can be traced back to darker roots of a medical field called tropical medicine. They claim the power dynamics are unbalanced and at the core of these trips is paternalism. That being said, they aren't calling for the eradication of study abroad trips, or service learning trips. In fact, they even say that a step in the right direction is to make these trips accessible for students because they are important. Their solution was to come up with six questions to ask yourself before taking students to different countries: Are the students appropriately prepared? Is the trip based on bilateral institutional partnerships? Is the trip complemented with reciprocity efforts? Who benefits from the trip? What kind of learning takes place, and how is it guided? Are the environmental and financial costs of the trip worth it? These questions, they claim, do not undermine the purpose of service learning trips, they just make them more ethical.
My mom isn’t full of cynicism, she’s full of caution. What I've learned from doing this research is that international trips can be meaningful, but only when they move away from “feel-good” narratives and center the needs and leadership of the communities involved. When these programs focus primarily on our own personal transformation, they can grow into paternalic and power hungry programs. However, if we design these with ethics, reciprocity, and accountability in mind they can become great opportunities for cross-cultural learning. The challenge is not to abandon service learning trips, but to push for them to be done correctly. Service should be rooted in humanity and impact, not photo-ops and intention.
This section reflects on a firsthand or immersive experience related to the Pathway topic.
I was very lucky to spend a few hours before Thanksgiving at Tabitha Way’s Food Bank. I went with 12 other student leaders, and we worked for three to four hours sorting food that had been donated. It was an eye-opening experience for me, and it sparked a lot of thoughts. First, it was interesting, and a little funny, to see how much ketchup had been donated. SO MUCH KETCHUP!! But beyond the humor, it made me realize how donations are often unevenly distributed, a reflection of what is easiest to grab and what we think will be hopeful rather than what is truly essential. To build on that, I also had never considered how expensive formula is, or how important it is for families in need. Seeing how rare it was to find in a donation box made me understand some of the difficulties families might have to face when trying to consider what to spend their money on that month.
I was also struck by the amount of food they had. When we talk about food insecurity, I feel as if the conversation often jumps to “Let’s do a food drive!” immediately. After seeing all the donations that they had just sitting their underrated really put some things into perspective for me. Food insecurity isn’t just about collecting food, it’s also about logistics, organization, time and people-power. There weren’t people who could just endlessly sort the food all day until the boxes were empty. I can see how some people with good intentions can inadvertently fall short when it comes to addressing food insecurity. Food can go bad if it’s not processed quickly enough and people might feel like their donation of 20 canned vegetables and 10 ketchup bottles is enough while not even knowing the larger systemic problem is still there sitting unsolved. It really drove home the point to me that band-aid solutions, though well-intentioned, aren’t just insufficient; they can unintentionally create harm by masking underlying issues and leaving gaps.
This experience connected deeply to the principles of community engaged learning for me. By working together as students with Tabitha's Way, I was able to see firsthand the complex issues of addressing food insecurity in my own community. They’re more than statistics and they’re not just in reports, these are my neighbors, friends, members of my congregation and peers in my community. CELR emphasizes collaboration, reflection, and action. These experiences allowed me to hit all three of those pillars. It reinforced for me that meaningful change requires more than temporary solutions; it needs understanding, collaboration, and commitment. Working at the food bank wasn’t just me sorting through food and talking with friends, it was about being able to zoom out and understand the broader context of an issue, building empathy with my group, and recognizing my role as a student and community member in complex social issues such as food insecurity.
This section offers closing reflections and invites readers to consider how they can apply the insights in their own lives and communities.
My experiences this past month have made one thing very clear to me: addressing food insecurity requires more than good intentions; it requires all of us. Food drives alone won’t solve the problem, and sometimes they can even create more harm than good. What truly makes an impact is showing up, learning, and engaging with the real needs of our community.
I encourage you to go out and get involved in ways that go beyond the donation box. Tabitha’s Way is always looking for more volunteers, just click here to see how and when you can go. Doing this really does make a difference and helps you learn about the systems that create food insecurity. After you donate your time and learn about the issue, talk about it. Talk about food insecurity with family and friends, your congregation, your neighbors and other community members. This does two things - it brings awareness and gets more people involved, and it also helps fight the stigma.
Small acts matter, but they matter more when we stay informed and active. By choosing to engage directly, to reflect on your actions and to stay committed, you become part of long-term change. Food insecurity is a community issue. That means the real solution starts with us.
