Big, small, paper, plastic, reusable, between early May and Friday, May 23, bags of all shapes and sizes are being dropped off at the CCCE office in Sayles Hill Campus Center. Over the past few weeks, CCCE hosted their “bag drive” event in collaboration with the Northfield Community Education center to support the Community Action Center (CAC) food shelf locations in Rice County.
The bag drive is one of Carleton’s new efforts to support the CAC, otherwise known as the “tiny food shelf.” The event aims to collect bags to donate as grocery bags for the use of those who shop at the food shelf.
According to Michael Pursell, food access program director at the CAC, “the basic purpose of the food shelves is to offer free food to qualifying low income families.” The CAC has two locations in Northfield and one in Faribault.. In Northfield alone, the food shelves see 80 to 100 families daily.
Historically, the Carleton community has collaborated with the CAC for many years. “We have a really fantastic, long standing partnership with Carleton in a lot of ways, especially through CCCE,” said Pursell; “there are lots and lots of different strands of connection and collaboration.”
“Part of the relationship between the CCCE and their community partners is trying to do this sort of thing where we see what their priorities are and address those. So we thought [the bag drive] would be something that’s helpful,” said Moriah Reusch ’27, a student involved with the event through the CCCE.
“Carleton has been a really great partner to CAC in a lot of ways for years,” said Pursell. “We have Carleton students who are really prominently involved in staffing our NCEC food shelf locations.” According to Pursell, students also “work through the CCCE and food recovery network to help with our food rescue effort on a weekly basis.” Furthermore, the organization creates two work-study positions for Carleton students.
The “bag drive” is a new strand of these long standing connections. The event aims to provide grocery bags and other containers for those shopping at the food shelves. “One of the things that [the CAC] looks for logistically, is that it’s nice to have extra bags, or just containers that people who are shopping there can use to carry groceries in,” said Reusch.
It becomes very expensive for the food shelf to provide grocery bags to its shoppers, so the CAC food shelves ask all of their participants to bring their own containers. Still, “not everybody has their own to bring. And there are always people who forget, or who are coming straight from work, so there’s a pretty constant demand for grocery bags, especially reusable ones,” said Pursell.
“It’s nice to have donations so we can support their work for that,” said Reusch. While the bag drive has happened previously during fall term, Reusch notes that the office is trying to advertise it more this term since “people are cleaning out in the spring, moving off campus. Hopefully if they have extra bags, instead of throwing those in the trash, they can go towards a more useful thing.”
“[The bag drive] is an exciting new effort,” said Pursell. “We normally don’t really do anything to source these bags. But they’re really appreciated when we’re able to offer them more. So this is a really good new initiative.”
