By: Michael Bautista, Follow South Jersey Community Journalist
On a typical weekday morning, inside a modest house just off Rowan University’s main campus, the rhythm is constant. Cans are clinking, footsteps echo off the wooden floor, and volunteers are weighing donations down to the pound. It looks like a food pantry, but the people running The Shop say it has become something bigger.
“It was back in 2016,” said Dr. Andrew Perrone, assistant director for the Office of Volunteerism and Community Engagement at Rowan University. Students, he said, were quietly telling one another they were struggling to afford food and other essential items. What began as a tattered conversation soon became a push for action, one that was led not by administrators but by the students themselves.
At the center of that early effort was Rbrey Singleton, who served as an executive board member and board of trustees member in the Student Government Association (SGA) at Rowan at the time of the initiative. Singleton later went on to become the SGA president. As a student leader, he pushed for the pantry and came to university officials with what he was hearing from his fellow peers, but was met with no response from the university’s administrators.
While they heard some students were anecdotally struggling with food insecurity, they wanted proof. Administrators requested Singleton gather data and return with concrete data.
He opted to reach out to other administrators who’d assist him in collecting the data needed. Singleton reached out to Dr. Penny McPherson-Myers, who now serves as the Vice Chancellor of Rowan University’s Division of Student Access and Pathway Programs, will assist him in collecting that data.
So in 2016, a task force that included Perrone was launched and began what they called the Student Hunger on Campus survey (SHOC), using federal standards to measure food insecurity. The results were difficult to ignore.
“At the time, we saw over a third of our students had experienced food insecurity,” said Perrone.
The data moved the university act. In March 2017, Rowan opened The Shop in a former lounge inside the Rowan Boulevard apartment building, a modest space that was meant to meet that urgent need. But within a few years, the pantry’s success began creating its own problem.
By 2019, Perrone had taken over the shop’s lead administrator and was watching donations steadily outpace the building’s capacity. Partnerships with regional food banks were growing, and the shelf space was tighter.
“We were seeing a lot more available resources and inventory and donations,” said Perrone. “More so than we had the capacity to handle.”
Relief came through an unexpected opportunity. The provost’s office announced that Rowan owned several vacant residential properties around Glassboro and invited proposals for how they might be repurposed to benefit students. Perrone made his pitch, and the provost approved it.
“So he gave me the building,” said Perrone.
Transforming the aging house into a functioning pantry required more than moving boxes. A Hunger-Free Campus grant from the state was first applied for in early 2020, delayed when funds were diverted for the COVID-19 response, and ultimately awarded in 2021, which helped finance extensive renovations. The workers reinforced the floors to support the weight of industrial refrigerators and shelving, and they upgraded the electrical systems. When the shop reopened in its new home, the pantry space alone had more than tripled, and refrigeration capacity more than doubled.
The expansion also gave Perrone room to pursue a broader vision. From the beginning, he believed food insecurity rarely exists in isolation.
“If you’re a student who is experiencing food insecurity…there’s more than likely other basic needs that you could use some resources and support,” he said. “It’s rarely ‘I am fully secure in everything except for food.’”
The Shop then began evolving into what Perrone calls a “resource center model.” Today, students who come for groceries may also find a professional clothing closet upstairs, operated in partnership with Rowan’s Office of Career Advancement. A shared office hosts graduate social work interns who help connect students to housing assistance, benefits, and other campus services. The goal is to remove friction at the exact moment a student asks for help.
“Why do you have to go to 17 different locations to learn about these things?” said Perrone, who believes there should be a one-stop shop for all campus resources.
Behind the scenes, the operation runs on a carefully choreographed and largely invisible weekly cycle. Through partnerships with The Food Bank of South Jersey and Philabundace, plus two local retailers, including two Acme stores, the Glassboro Shoprite, and Dollar General, The Shop receives well over 1,000 pounds of donated goods per week. Every item must be picked up by The Shop’s drivers, weighed, and then categorized for Feeding America reporting, inspected for safety, and sorted onto the shelves.
“There’s a lot of sorting and restocking,” said Perrone. “Every week…you do it one week, and then you’ve got to do it all over again.”
The staffing model reflects The Shop’s grassroots origins. Perrone splits his time across multiple university responsibilities. Pantry coordinator Liz Burek works part-time and dedicates much of her time to The Shop.
Beyond Perrone and Burek are six different work-study students who are paid through their financial aid packages. Then several student interns aren’t paid but are working to receive some form of class credits. Rounding out the team is a sizable amount of volunteers who serve simply to support the overall mission of The Shop.
“Without them, we can’t do what we do,” said Perrone
Donations follow a seasonal rhythm. Food contribution surges during Thanksgiving and Christmas, when community giving peaks. But one of the largest influxes arrives in May, when Rowan University’s residence halls empty out. Residential assistants ask the departing students whether they have items to donate, which many do.
The Shop receives everything from canned food to small appliances and full-length mirrors, items that might otherwise be discarded. Much of it is stored through the summer and redistributed in August, when students move into their first on or off-campus apartments. The supplies are especially valuable for international students arriving with limited luggage space.
“It comes really in handy,” said Perrone.
Financially, the operation remains a patchwork. The Shop does not receive steady recurring funding beyond a small annual allocation from Rowan’s Student Government Association. Instead, Perrone and his team continuously scan for grant opportunities from repeated Hunger-Free Campus awards to foundation gifts and a recent Swipe Out Hunger grant that will expand kosher food offerings for students who need them.
Five years from now, Perrone hopes the transformation underway inside The Shop will be unmistakable.
“I’m confident and proud of the pantry we are,” he said. “But I’d like to be much more of a resource center that houses a pantry as well.”
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