Chicago Tribune reports: Kennedy-King College market offers students fresh food for free in an area with limited grocery options

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 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, 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.

One Monday afternoon, Ciera Lyons, a 35-year-old student at Kennedy-King, 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 from the Greater Chicago Food Depository, funded in partnership with City Colleges of Chicago. Kennedy-King receives 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 to order select items and quantities from the pantry’s warehouse.

Read the full story in the Chicago Tribune.