The Statesmen Market at Kennedy-King College in Englewood looks and feels like a regular grocery store. Students come in, pick up a cart or basket, and swivel through the aisles, adding apples, noodles, potatoes and milk to their haul. But only students can shop here, and everything is free.
The market — deliberately not referred to as a pantry to slash stigmas around emergency food — opened in February through a partnership between City Colleges of Chicago and the Greater Chicago Food Depository. It provides students at Kennedy-King College and their families free, healthy food and select household items, but it’s also playing a small part in addressing food insecurity in the Englewood neighborhood, where fresh food options are limited.
One Monday afternoon, Ciera Lyons, a 35-year-old student at Kennedy-King College, visited Statesmen Market to pick up some butter. She’s trying to save money and did not have time that day to drive to a store farther away, she explained.
“We don’t have many grocery stores in the neighborhood,” Lyons said.
Lyons used to shop at the Englewood Whole Foods on 832 W. 63rd Street before it closed down in 2022. Though it was replaced with a Save A Lot, concerns remained around limited fresh food access in that area. From her Englewood home, Aldi is a little less than two miles away, but the Statesmen Market is closer.
“And the quality is really fresh,” she said. “Honestly, better than Save A Lot … that meat is never good.”
The market won’t solve food insecurity in the neighborhood, but it can help solve the issue amongst its student population, said Allison Rose, Kennedy-King College Vice President of Student Affairs.
Everything at Statesmen Market (6301 S. Halsted St.) is donated by the Greater Chicago Food Depository in weekly truckloads with 4,000 pounds of food. Typical inventory ranges from produce and meat to light bulbs and infant teething crackers.
Statesmen Market is part of City Colleges’ Food Security for Life initiative launched in 2025, and an expansion of a former classroom-sized food pantry on Kennedy-King’s campus. The earliest iteration of the market was a hallway in an academic building where students could pick up pre-bagged items before it shifted to a classroom that students could visit once a month to pick out groceries. Then last year, the college identified the current space, which significantly increased the limits of what students could take home.
City Colleges of Chicago has plans to eventually replicate the enhanced market experience at each of the seven schools in the community college network. In the meantime, any CCC student can visit the Statesmen Market once a week.
The format and language are key to its success. Not only is it called a market rather than a food pantry, but there are carts, baskets and aisles like any grocery store.
“There is a sense of agency to be able to shop for yourself, and every bit of the space looks like a grocery store — and probably, some grocery stores that our students don’t necessarily see all the time,” Rose said.
A couple of the market’s student employees are in the Student Government Association, which Rose said helps with outreach to students who may not want to ask for help or acknowledge that they need food assistance. When the market gets a stock of sought-after items like trail mix bars or peanut butter and jelly Uncrustables, SGA students who work there will tell their classmates and friends.
“I didn’t think (the Uncrustables) would be a huge deal but I guess students love them. As soon as they found out they were in here, a flood of students came by. And then that opens the door for more students,” Rose said.
Inventory at the Statesmen Market primarily depends on what the Greater Chicago Food Depository has to offer, but there is an online system for Kennedy-King College to order select items and quantities from the pantry’s warehouse.
“We hope this design continues to evolve in the work of emergency food in general because there is a stigma with (emergency) food access in a traditional setting. It comes with a lot of baggage,” said Amy Laboy, vice president of programs and community partnerships at the Greater Chicago Food Depository.
Laboy emphasized the market’s role in protecting students and families who have experienced recurring eligibility or timing issues with the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program as well. Those students, she said, often have to make choices to prioritize basic needs over pursuing an education.
“Hopefully, students (at Kennedy-King) can get the food support they need to stay in school and not have to step away from classes to work,” Laboy explained. “It makes a response like this even more important so we can try to eliminate some of those trade-off decisions.”
Tiara Davis, a 33-year-old computer science major, said the Statesmen Market meets her needs in ways traditional pantries do not.
“Being able to go into a place and actually choose what it is that I want or don’t want, versus having it chosen for me is the best thing about it,” Davis said. “And me and my middle child have a lot of different allergies, so I’m able to be picky about what I take instead of being handed something I can’t eat.”
Davis runs a tight ship in a full house in the Auburn-Gresham neighborhood. She has three children, ages 13, 8 and 5, as well as custody of her cousin’s teenage boys, who are 17 and 19.
Between the kids and attending Kennedy-King full-time, Davis doesn’t work and relies mainly on custody support checks to fill in the gaps of her boyfriend’s income. The couple splits the day-to-day responsibilities of raising their children, Davis said, but basic living expenses have multiplied lately.
“The grocery costs have just skyrocketed,” Davis said. “And I expected that as my kids got older and with teenage boys, but the amount of times they eat, oh my goodness.”
The items she picks up most during weekly visits to the Statesmen Market are fresh produce, chicken and Cornish hens, and microwavable to-go meals from the freezer section.
“For me, the market is supplementary and what they provide absolutely cuts into the cost of me having to go into the grocery store to buy three or four bags of chicken, I can just get two now, because I know I’m getting two at Statesmen,” Davis said.
Several items in the meat freezer have limits to ensure there is enough to go around. Other products that typically have limits are oatmeal, yogurt cups, ramen noodles, pinto beans, fresh fruit like apples, oranges and tomatoes, as well as milk, eggs and cheese. Rose, the VP, said limits on certain items fluctuate depending on inventory.
When they can, they try to stock dairy-free alternatives or vegan items, and things high in protein for student athletes.
That Monday afternoon, Rivano Amelo, a student worker at the Statesmen Market, was restocking the vanilla protein shakes.
Amelo, an international student from South America, said that while he doesn’t have the same economic stressors as some of his classmates juggling families, the market has helped him save money while he’s on his own in Chicago.
“I try to eat healthy — and healthy food is a bit expensive in America,” he said with a laugh. “So this really, really helps.”
Amelo works twice a week but is hoping to get more hours in the summer.
“The Statesmen Market will be open all summer long — we do not close,” said Rose, vice president of the school. “Us closing down would be so detrimental to the community we serve.”
In 2024, City Colleges of Chicago surveyed its students and found that 50% of respondents across the community college system identified as food insecure. At Kennedy-King College alone, 60% of students self-identified as food insecure.
The survey was facilitated by the Hope Center at Temple University, which defined food insecurity as “experiencing limited or uncertain availability of nutritionally adequate and safe food or the ability to acquire such food in a socially acceptable manner in the prior 30 days.”
City Colleges serve over 66,000 students across Chicago, and over 80% are Black and Latino. Based on the survey, reports of basic needs insecurity is highest at colleges serving primarily Black students.
Food insecurity among college students also remains a pervasive national issue. A recent Department of Education study reported that 23% of U.S. undergraduates and 12% of graduate students experience food insecurity, affecting more than 4 million students. Those numbers are disproportionately higher among Black and Indigenous students.
In underserved predominantly Black communities, “every little bit helps,” said Saria Lofton, researcher and professor in the Department of Population Health Nursing Science at the University of Illinois Chicago.
“Student food insecurity is a real problem and has been a problem — it’s been understudied a bit, actually,” Lofton said. “To have this kind of safety net that supports students at a very critical time in their life when they’re trying to better themselves by going to school, there’s a multifaceted impact to that.”
Much of Lofton’s research looks at developing a multi-level, multi-component food system intervention to address food insecurity inequities amongst Black American residents living in predominantly Black communities. A big part of that is also the lack of fresh produce and healthy options in these areas, she said.
“The lack of choice on the South Side has been a problem for a long time,” she offered. “On the flip side, when you go to say, Roosevelt and State (in South Loop), you have four corners and in those four corners is a Trader Joe’s, a Jewel, a Mariano’s and you could walk half a mile and go to Whole Foods.”
Not only is there choice in neighborhoods like River North or South Loop or Lincoln Park, but it’s also walkable, Lofton noted.
“The predominantly Black communities that we’re talking about … Englewood, South Shore, (look in) any direction and you’re not going to get that,” she said. “You’re looking at convenience stores, which is not an adequate way to feed your family.”
Lofton said one of her favorite places to shop is Forty Acres Fresh Market in the Austin neighborhood, and hopes it can one day become a model for more community-owned businesses. But for that to happen in more historically disinvested neighborhoods, there needs to be some involvement from the city to provide the infrastructure and institutional knowledge to be successful.
Lyons, the 35-year-old Kennedy-King student, said Statesmen Market has effectively replaced at least one of her biweekly or monthly grocery store trips.
“I know this isn’t a real grocery store for everybody, but it’s creating an example of what we could have in our communities,” Lyons said.
