Auburn Sustenance Project: Students giving back to the community

Auburn University students and the Auburn community have the opportunity to help those in need through the Auburn Sustenance Project, a student-led organization that works to reduce food insecurity within Auburn City Schools.

The Auburn Sustenance Project distributes meals and snacks during spring and summer breaks and Thanksgiving and winter holidays to Auburn City Schools students who qualify for free and reduced lunches.

“I think that it’s our responsibility as students to find ways to give back to the Auburn community while we’re here and after, but especially while we’re here,” said Emma Chumley, founder and president of the Auburn Sustenance Project. “It’s the least I can do to give back to the local community that’s been great to me in a ton of ways and this place that has given me the best four years of my life.”

Chumley, a senior majoring in nursing, helped start the Auburn Sustenance Project during her first year at Auburn, along with students in the College of Human Sciences’ Department of Human Development and Family Science.

After learning about the impacts of food insecurity on academic success, family dynamics and physical, social and cognitive development in Caroline Payne-Purvis’ child development class, these students desired to address the issue locally. Chumley hosted a food drive as part of her Honors project for the class, which helped lead to the creation of the sustenance project.

“We saw through that food drive that there was a lot of need,” Chumley said. “When the kids are on school breaks, the kids aren’t getting the breakfast, lunch and snack they normally get at school. So, when we heard about that, we decided it was something we wanted to try to keep doing.”

Prior to each school break, there is a packing day where volunteers will sort and organize the donated food. After the food has been divided into stations for breakfast, lunch and snacks, volunteers fill each bag with five breakfasts, five lunches and 15 snacks — enough food to last each student a week. The bags are then stored until distribution day.

Distribution occurs a few days after the packing day at Auburn’s First Baptist Church. Volunteers arrive 30-45 minutes early to set up then help families sign in, take bags to their cars and enjoy some fellowship.

Any Auburn student is welcome to volunteer with the project on packing and distribution days. In the past, the Auburn swimming and diving team, football team and some sororities have volunteered.

When the project first started in 2021, it only reached a few families, but its impact has grown exponentially over time and will continue to grow.

“We know that we can feed 500 kids each break,” said Payne-Purvis, faculty advisor for the Auburn Sustenance Project. “We have seen in the last year those numbers really go over 500, and for us to be able to sustain going over 500, we’re going to have to get more donations.

“No question, I think we could easily see this summer feeding close to 1,000 if we had the right amount of donations.”

Project organizers are looking for donations to help expand their reach.

“Once people hear what we do, they are normally very generous,” Chumley said. “I think the Auburn Family is very interested in giving back to the university and the community, but the awareness that people are actually going through food insecurity is not as well known.”

Giving teachers a helping hand

Another big initiative of the project — which was profiled in the “In the Halls of Spidle” video series in 2022 — is providing K-5 teachers in Auburn City Schools with snacks to have in their classrooms. Each semester teachers can fill out a Google form and request snacks that are then packaged and delivered by project volunteers. These teachers can then give snacks to their students who are unable to bring their own.  

“The K-5 students are required to bring a snack every day, and if they don’t have breakfast or lunch, how are they bringing a snack?” Payne-Purvis said. “This [providing snacks to teachers] reduces the stress on the families, but we also noticed a big reduction in stress and cost for teachers and counselors.”

School counselors are great resources for the Auburn Sustenance Project, as they know which students in their schools could utilize the project. Counselors can send notes home with students informing families about the next distribution day.

The project also uses social media to spread the word about packing and distribution days. Facebook and Instagram, along with its website, are the project’s most popular ways of informing the community.

Some families are regulars at each distribution day, while some may come only once.

“I think that might have been the only time they came and picked up,” Katie White, Auburn Sustenance Project vice president, said of one particular family. “It was nice to see that we could help during a time of crisis, which is what this project is geared toward. They could get back on their feet and not worry about food on the table for a few weeks.”