This semester, Missouri State University’s Center for Community Engagement partnered with Drew Lewis Foundation to open up Bear Pantry, an initiative to serve students of our campus community who face food insecurity. Sigma Chi and Theta Chi fraternity have been two chapters in our Fraternity and Sorority Life Community who have taken action to support and donate to this great addition to our Missouri State campus!

Brandon Gaffney, Sigma Chi Secretary, has many duties in his role and being in charge of philanthropy is one. Brandon said the following about Sigma Chi’s efforts to support Bear Pantry…

“[Being in charge of philanthropy] allowed me the privilege to take head on planning the Sigma Chi Food Drive benefiting Bear Pantry! When the new exec board was elected, we knew that we wanted to improve our philanthropic donations and become more invested with philanthropic events around campus. After constructing a new philanthropy committee, we took the time to organize this event. I heard about the new Bear Pantry on campus and I felt that it would be a perfect opportunity to help jump start the Bear Pantry and give Sigma Chi an opportunity to fulfill Missouri State’s Public Affairs Mission by being engaged in the community in order to collect donations for the pantry. I know that there are so many students and families that suffer from food insecurity and I felt that this would be a perfect opportunity to help them overcome the obstacle of food insecurity in any way possible… As we were planning the food drive, I never really thought of a specific goal in mind in regards to how many donations we would receive, but we definitely exceeded any expectations that I could have had. After three days of collecting donations, we ended up collecting 1,150 items, totaling at 475.9 pounds of items. Along with food, we were also collecting toiletries, deodorant, toothpaste, toothbrushes, etc. and I was very happy to see some of those items donated as well. Not only did we want to collect food for the Bear Pantry, but we wanted to help spread information about the Bear Pantry to the students in hope that if someone ever finds themselves struggling, they now know they have somewhere to turn to for help. Everyone in the chapter, especially myself, was thrilled with the outcome of our food drive, and we are definitely looking forward to working with the Bear Pantry a lot more in the future. Lastly, Sigma Chi would like to extend a big thank you to everyone who donated to our food drive because without your generous donations we wouldn’t have been as successful as we were!”

Abdillahi Dirie of Theta Chi talks about their initiative to help promote and give back to Bear Pantry saying the following…

“We wanted to hold an event with Mo State Movement and we eventually [came up with] Dancing with the Stars. This pretty much was a philanthropy event created with the help of Jaymes Dickinson and Patrick Seacrist. We decided to give the community the opportunity to pay $3 or bring 2 canned food donations to help out the Bear Pantry. Alex Johnson and his office created this program to help other students who are in need of certain items that they don’t usually have. We wanted to help kick start this program and now with the help of various organization on campus, the pantry was fully stocked before spring break which is very cool to see. We collected 194 items and it came out to be 191.3 pounds.”

We are so proud of these chapters and all the members of our Fraternity and Sorority Life community and campus community who helped make these donations possible! To learn more about how you can use Bear Pantry or how to get involved in helping out, click here!