Food insecurity has continued to rise among graduate students, Graduate Student Council members said at the Wednesday December general board meeting.
Spending to supply the graduate student food pantry has skyrocketed following increased demand for food. The GSC has also expanded food spending to include graduate student breakfast events in spring 2024.
In spring 2025, $7,075 — including $3,774 for pantry items — was spent on the food programs, a drastic increase from the $4,730 spent in fall 2024, according to data sent to The Herald by Sofia Verba GS, the council’s chair of student life. In spring 2023, the GSC spent just $623 on supplies for its pantry. Verba attributes the jump to the addition of perishable items after the University provided the GSC with a dedicated pantry refrigerator. The council is projected to spend around $8,500 on food by the end of the fall 2025 semester.
“There is more demand,” Verba said in an interview with The Herald. “We used to only have non-perishables, and now we have perishables, and they just disappear really quickly.”
While the GSC does not track which students use GSC programs for food, they believe the programs are mostly used by master’s and international graduate students who are not eligible for benefits from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, Verba told The Herald.
Food-insecure graduate students also take advantage of Brown Market Shares, a program that distributes local produce to Brown community members at a reduced price. The program is subsidized by the Graduate School, according to Verba.
Two new graduate student groups, the Brown Anthropology Graduate Student Association and the Taiwanese Graduate Student Association, were approved by the Student Activities Office, said GSC Chair of Nominations Aysun Akhundlu GS.
But Akhundlu claimed that approval processes for the groups were prolonged due to higher scrutiny of affinity groups by the Student Activities Office after the University’s July deal with the federal government.
“The approval process for student organizations, whether undergraduate or graduate, has not changed at all in response to the federal agreement,” Joie Forte, senior associate dean and director of student activities, wrote in an email to The Herald.
Forte wrote that University policy “requires that student groups be open to all and that they be advertised as such.”
“This requirement has also been reflected on the GSC and (Undergraduate Council of Students) websites since spring 2024,” Forte added.
“SAO is asking (clubs) to change descriptions in their constitutions when it comes to identity-based groups,” Akhundlu said. She noted that the Taiwanese Graduate Student Association is currently undergoing the process of editing its constitution. “They applied in August and they are final approved, but I learned today that there are still some issues happening with SAO.”
Undergraduate student affinity groups have faced similar run-ins with the SAO regarding language in their constitutions, The Herald previously reported.
The GSC will meet with SAO to discuss student group approval troubles, Akhundlu said.
Verba also announced the creation of a new graduate parent community for graduate students with children, which is set to launch next semester.
The Wednesday gathering was also the first general body meeting to follow an updated structure. Instead of holding a continuous two-hour block from 7 to 9 p.m., the council will only address formal affairs for the first hour. The second hour will be reserved for attendees to connect with the officers directly, according to GSC President Kevin LoGiudice ScM’21 GS.
The change is one of several intended to encourage graduate students, particularly the GSC department representatives, to attend the meetings after continuous low turnout, LoGiudice said.
Inspired by graduate student leadership at peer institutions, the GSC has been brainstorming ways to increase turnout to its general board meetings, LoGiudice said. Some graduate councils at other schools will revoke conference travel funding from departments if their representatives do not show up to their meetings, but LoGiudice called this measure “harsh.”
The council does not currently have formal consequences for department representatives who skip meetings. If representatives are continuously absent, they are issued a warning, but if offenses continue, they are removed and another department representative must be found. LoGiudice noted that finding interested students can be difficult.
One current incentive for members to attend the Wednesday meetings is access to free drink tickets for the Graduate Center Bar, which can be redeemed later that night. But “Wednesday (has) unofficially become the undergrad night” at the bar, making it hard to redeem tickets since the bar is so crowded, said Nikita Redkar GS, the GSC vice president of advocacy.
To counter this, the council is aiming to make tickets redeemable for the Friday after the meeting, Redkar said.
In his update, LoGiudice said that response rates for the Campus Climate Survey have hit over 40% for Ph.D. students and over 30% for master’s students, an increase from the 18% response rate seen across all graduate students in 2023’s Campus Climate Survey.
“This is a massive improvement,” he said, adding that recently, “grad student data hasn’t necessarily been fully representative of the full population.”
Matthew Guterl, vice president of diversity and inclusion, will address the GSC about the survey’s results after they are released next semester, LoGiudice added.
Additionally, the council is considering amending its constitution to gradually raise activity fees each year, rather than voting to raise them when needed every few years. This approach would align with that of the Undergraduate Council of Students, which currently raises its activity fee by a certain percentage each year. The amendment would make it easier to keep up as costs become more expensive, LoGiudice said.
The specifics of the amendment have not yet been settled and the final change would have to be approved by the Brown Corporation, the University’s highest governing body. Since the Corporation votes on activity fees in February and the next GSC meeting will not occur until just before the vote, the change would likely go into effect for the 2027-28 academic year, LoGiudice said.
Ian Ritter is a senior staff writer for university news. A junior studying chemistry, he covers the graduate schools & students and admissions & financial aid beats. When he isn’t at The Herald or exploding lab experiments, you can find him playing the clarinet, watching the Mets or eating Ratty carrot cake.
