A FRESH Start: Chabot College’s Life Pantry

Produced by Sofia Sanchez Pillot Saavedra
Fall 2018

The project I worked on for the Food Systems Capstone Course was a short 10-minute film in collaboration with the FRESH food pantry at Chabot College. When I was a student at Chabot Community College, I came across a class called Passion and Purpose, which focused on student’s passions and ways to leverage that passion into initiatives and projects. In my time at Chabot, I realized I was passionate about the environment, food issues and the wider community of Hayward, and found that a Food pantry was a resource highly needed on campus. With a group of students, faculty and staff at Chabot, the FRESH food pantry came to fruition and by the time I transferred to UC Berkeley, the project had taken off with its first pop-up event in May of 2017. To this day, the pantry has served over 7000 people. FRESH has also started distributing clothing and is planning on expanding to hygiene products as well as school materials. The energy around this project was incredibly humbling, and it left me with the urge to document it into a short film that could be shared to raise awareness and inspire anyone interested in issues surrounding food insecurity and student collaboration.

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