Printed text on yellow background as a word cloud, including words "Retriever Essentials. Community partnerships. Save-a-swipe"

Retriever Essentials student team is runner-up in a nationwide competition to address world hunger

Oct 6, 2023 / 3 minutes of reading

Retriever Essentials, represented by student volunteers Nhi Nguyen ’25, biochemistry and bioinformatics, and Ben Bhattarai ’23, biology and psychology, is a second place finalist in the 2023 Wilbur Ellis Innovation Award. Announced at the end of September, the honorable mention award—given to only four schools—recognizes the student teams with the most innovative strategies for providing food for a growing world population. Continue Reading Retriever Essentials student team is runner-up in a nationwide competition to address world hunger

a group of young people gather around a garden plot, working the soil

Growing Fruitful Campus Connections

Jun 15, 2023 / 4 minutes of reading

The occasional clang of a shovel rings through the chilly spring air amid the chatter of a small group of cheerful students at the UMBC Community Garden. The students and Ariel Barbosa, program coordinator for Retriever Essentials at UMBC and a master’s student in community leadership, are working hard to ready seven garden plots for crop production the growing season. Already, cold-hardy greens are on their way in one bed, and cucumbers and eggplant are growing indoors awaiting transplant. The gardening effort is a new initiative of Retriever Essentials, a faculty, staff, and student partnership to tackle food insecurity within… Continue Reading Growing Fruitful Campus Connections

Colorful bubbles and circular photos of various headshots

Connecting the Dots

Nov 30, 2022 / 15 minutes of reading

For students pursuing experiential learning through internships, campus jobs, research, and community engagement, it’s not just about learning how to do the thing they want to do. It’s about connecting the work to the passions that brought them to UMBC in the first place. These students and alumni working in their chosen fields tell the whole picture—what hands-on learning looks like when it comes full circle. Continue Reading Connecting the Dots

Feeding A Need: Retriever Essentials Tackles Food Insecurity

May 31, 2018 / 4 minutes of reading

In a first-of-its-kind survey released in April, researchers at the Wisconsin HOPE Lab at Temple University found that at 66 colleges and universities, 36 percent of students do not get enough to eat. This comes as no surprise to Julie Rosenthal, program management specialist for Asian studies and the doctoral program in gerontology, who helped spearhead the launch of UMBC’s Retriever Essentials — an on-campus food pantry run by students, for students — in September 2017. “If you stop and think about it … it makes sense,” Rosenthal said. “These students age out of the public school system where they… Continue Reading Feeding A Need: Retriever Essentials Tackles Food Insecurity

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