Students with an excess of dining dollars at the end of the year could buy items to donate to charities.
Presidential scholars often have so many dining dollars to spend it’s become a joke at TU. “Befriend a prezzie,” someone might say to another who’s complaining about lack of food or running low on their own dining dollars. Because these individuals have $5,558 allocated for housing and dining, they can have a range of dining dollars available.
Burning through that amount of money in a semester, even buying for friends or random goods from the C-store, could be difficult. If students, by the end of the year, are still looking for a way to spend all their money and have gotten sick of ACAC’s offerings, or if they don’t need another set of pots and pans from the library cafe, they instead could buy non-perishable foods and household goods from the C-store or cafe and donate them to places in need.
If you have extra money to spend and are planning on just raiding the vending machine for candy at the end of the year, consider raiding the C-store first. According to various news outlets, some of the best items to donate, other than common canned goods, are toilet paper, bath essentials, dental hygiene essentials, feminine hygiene products, first aid items and school supplies, all of which the C-store offers.
Next time you stop in there, consider adding one of those items to your shopping bag, and by the end of the year, you’ll have a huge collection to drop off at a food pantry. There are several close by: the Community Foodbank of Eastern Oklahoma, Helping Hand and Catholic Charities of Eastern Oklahoma, along with countless others. Plus, if you’re lucky, the dorms will be running some sort of donation-based program and you won’t even have to leave TU’s campus.
