Community Partner: Bearcat Pantry and Resource Center; Family First Program
The BCP and Resource Center’s mission is to assist students with resources in an effort to cut down their grocery bills and promote wellness and independence. The BCP is designed to provide supplemental support options to the various insecurities facing students and the Bearcat community.
The BCP has a vision to become a premier resource center example for public, urban college campuses. We aim to provide students with a robust network of support systems that will allow them to be healthy, independent, and successful. We believe no student at the University of Cincinnati should suffer due to lack of basic needs.
Family First Program
Many students at UC have family needs and other obligations outside of school that can present obstacles in their learning careers. The Family First Program aims to eliminate the barriers specifically related to accessing diapers and other childcare items for UC community members with children in their families.
About Will
Hello All! My name is Will Smith and I’m a medical student partnering with UC’s Bearcat Pantry and the Family First Program run within it. I’m from Sunbury, Ohio, a small town just north of Columbus, and went to the University of Notre Dame for undergrad. I enjoy cooking a good meal, playing videogames or watching anime to the wee hours of the morning, watching football (Go Irish!), and corny puns. My family is Liberian and immigrated to America in the 70s. Service and advocacy have been guiding principles for me on my journey to become a physician.
Growing up, family and friends had a very difficult time accessing healthcare and managing their own health conditions. I saw firsthand how cultural differences, assumptions from healthcare practioners, socioeconomic conditions etc led to healthcare disparities for my loved ones and the marginalized groups they belonged to. That’s why as a future family physician, my goal is to address the social determinates of health that my patients face to collaborate on ways to improve the health of the community I practice in and empower those people to take hold of their own well-being.
From a very young age my Dad inspired a deep reverence for education and it’s power as a vehicle for uplifting oneself out of poverty and hopelessness to greater aspirations, financial prospects, and shifts in one’s own perspective that promote tolerance for others and social change. He himself was able to come to the US by education visa and, while not rich by any measure, was able to provide a childhood for my brother and I far more comfortable than his own in a rural village located in Grand Bassa County, Monrovia. Only now do I appreciate how right my Dad was, that there is no more consistent, reliable way to earn more money and chase your dreams than a college degree. But this opportunity hasn’t come without it’s own drawbacks for me or an ever growing subset of my peers.
Undergraduate and graduate students from a lower socioeconomic class, a group I identify with, do not have the same experience in their institutions as students with different backgrounds. And while any student, regardless of race, sexual orientation, or religion can undergo this type of hardship, statistically it is the underrepresented groups that are overrepresented when it comes to this metric. We work longer hours on top of our classes to earn enough money for bills, hesitate to ask our families for money in a pinch, that is if we’re not already sending our own money back home to help. We use food pantries to supplement our grocery budgets, career closets and thrift stores to build professional wardrobes. We rely on the resources of our community, the compassion of our peers or mentors, and our own ingenuity to survive with the hope of thriving in academic environments that were not built with us in mind. It’s because of this personal experience and the experiences of my friends that I choose to work with Bearcat Pantry.
The University of Cincinnati has long sought to help alleviate the aforementioned issues with the Bearcat Pantry and the associated resources students use to make rent, pay bills, and generally keep themselves afloat while learning their fields of study. The pantry has been a resource I’ve used myself multiple times. My goals through this collaboration will be to work on nutrition classes with their registered dietitian, teaching pantry clients about physiology and pathology regarding nutrition, and help to strengthen the Family First Initiative that seeks to provide resources to students building families while in school.