CINCINNATI — During the past academic year, more than 2,200 students, staff and faculty at the University of Cincinnati visited the Bearcats Pantry to receive assistance for food insecurity.
Associate Dean of Students Daniel S. Cummins founded the pantry in 2016, working since then to grow the on-campus resource center in order to support those in the Bearcats community who are going without basic human needs.
This past Friday, the pantry received the largest food donation in its history.
It came from The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which sent a truckload of 27,000 pounds of food to the Bearcats Pantry. The donation arrived on campus just ahead of Cincinnati’s Saturday home football game against BYU, which is sponsored and operated by the church.
“I haven’t had a donation like this from any kind of organization. Receiving this from a Big 12 community member, a conference member, is really moving,” Cummins told the Deseret News.
“... I think it goes to show the spirit and the community of Brigham Young University, how powerful the work of that institution’s principles and values are, to deliver 27,000 pounds of food across the nation, to the University of Cincinnati, to serve Bearcat students who are in need. I am moved beyond words of how grateful I am for such a generous donation.”
While the church provided the food, connecting with the Bearcats Pantry came as a result of the BYU Alumni Association’s Cincinnati chapter.
Chapter president Jim Wilson had recently become aware of the church’s plan to send out a truckload of donated food somewhere in the region prior to the holidays, but firm details had yet to be finalized.
Thus, Wilson made a call to a connection in the church’s welfare department to make the case for sending a truck to the Bearcats Pantry and timing it just ahead of BYU’s visit to Cincinnati. Before long, the wheels were turning.
“When Daniel first told me about this (donation), I think we were both a little speechless,” said Nicole Mayo, Cincinnati’s vice provost of Student Affairs.
“We talk often about the power of partnership, but we have never seen a partnership like this from someone outside of our (local) community. A peer in our Big 12 community said, ‘We want to support the University of Cincinnati students, and we’re going to do it in this way,’ and it means the world to us.”
The truck’s arrival in Cincinnati was met by a group of a few dozen royal blue-clad BYU fans, church members and full-time Latter-day Saint missionaries in the area who came with Wilson to help unload the food and stock the pantry’s shelves.
A day later, just before kickoff for the Cougars and Bearcats, many of those same individuals found themselves engaged in the alumni chapter’s other service effort — collecting winter coats at BYU’s pregame alumni tailgate in a joint effort with Cincinnati’s NAACP to donate to local elementary school students.
Even before the tailgate, BYU fans from around the country supported the project from afar by donating coats online through an Amazon wish list, with the donations piling up further and further in Wilson’s home with each passing day leading up to the tailgate.
“My garage is now full of coats,” Wilson said with a chuckle Friday. “It’s almost ridiculous.”
The hundreds of winter coats collected at the tailgate are the latest example of BYU’s “Cougs Care” program, where local alumni chapters organize service opportunities to benefit the communities of wherever BYU football plays on the road.
When the Cougars visited Texas Tech earlier this month, BYU’s alumni tailgate hosted a book drive to support a literacy group in Lubbock. For BYU’s trip to Iowa State in October, local fans collected children’s shoes and other winter gear in honor of an Iowa man who provided Latter-day Saint pioneer children with similar kindness nearly 200 years ago.
“Personally, I think we’re living by the motto of the university, just to enter to learn, go forth to serve,” said Alycia McClurg, the secretary for BYU’s Cincinnati alumni chapter. “That’s what we’re trying to do here with these service projects. Even though it’s a rival school for the football game, it’s more about people. We want to be good neighbors and benefit the communities that we live in now.”
The church’s food donation will help ease much more than hunger alone during the holidays. Cummins and his team rely heavily on donations to operate the Bearcats Pantry, with the financial contributions typically going to purchase more food.
But with the 27,000 pounds of food from the Latter-day Saint church, monetary donations are now freed up to diversify the pantry’s operation and provide materials for other essential needs, such as hygiene equipment, family-oriented products and baby supplies.
“The reality of it is we operate off of donations, and this donation is a significant one. It will allow us to move into this holiday season in a different kind of way and restructure how we serve students over the next couple of months,” Cummins said.
Considering BYU and Cincinnati have only shared the same athletic conference since 2023, the service and charity demonstrated this weekend is almost an introduction of sorts for the Bearcats community to see what the mission of BYU and The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints truly is.
“What this says to me is that what is central to BYU and its alumni is that they care about other people,” Mayo said. “And they care so deeply that their priority is to ensure that no matter who it is, they will have the resources to be well.”
“We’re in a time in today’s society where the need to serve is growing because the population needs to be served differently,” Cummins added. “I think this (donation) speaks to the spiritual values and the faith-based values that the Latter-day Saint community has been giving our society and our world for many years.”
