W&M Food Pantry
Interview with Max Blalock and Dania Matos
Campus Food Pantry - Fighting Hunger with Compassion
For this compassion spotlight, we interviewed Max Blalock and Dania Matos about their part in creation of the campus food pantry at the beginning of the year. Max Blalock serves as the Wesley Campus Minister and Dania Matos is the Deputy Chief Diversity Officer here at William and Mary. Together with student coordinators and members of the Wesley Foundation, they launched the pantry in an effort to support William and Mary students struggling with food insecurity.
Q: What values do you consider to be core to the operation of the pantry?
DM: For me, there are two that jump out. The first is equity. This includes looking at structural imbalances in a framework of whiteness and noticing how we have not served people with basic needs with human dignity. The other is an ethic of care. This means taking care of people the way they want to be cared for, not the way we assume they want to be cared for. I think these two values are embedded in a lot of the questions we ask regarding the pantry. When you’re-launching and piloting, you make a lot of choices about the populations you are going to serve without ever meeting them.
It’s not until you meet them and ask them that you begin to understand how to create new structures actually built by the community.
MB: I would also say that we are engaging with a group of people that are already feeling vulnerable and marginalized. We continually ask, how can we be more hospitable, more welcoming? We promote confidentiality, and we promote the fact that it is Wesley Campus Ministry doing it. This initiative stems from the fact that all of us had encountered students who were food insecure and wanted to do something about it.
Q: How do you make the pantry accessible and comfortable for students?
DM: I think it’s important to work from an equity asset framework rather than an equity deficit framework. When you’re working with people in need, you tend to think about what they don’t have instead of recognizing what strengths they bring - like courage and resilience. At the food pantry, we are asking how we can enhance the strengths they have already have to make them feel more supported.
MB: We also want to think about how we can utilize those strengths and wisdom that they bring to make the food pantry a better place. We offer patrons the opportunity to fill out a survey about their experiences. We ask about what hours would work best for them to come in and for
information on how often they are food insecure. In addition to this anecdotal data, we also utilize national data from the College and University Food Bank Alliance. The food pantry is only in its first couple of months. The entire team is committed to making sure that it will aid food insecure members of our community with compassion.
Sonia Kinkhabwala '22
