The Mutual Aid Collective, a group aiming to create a campus-wide donation network, held its first-ever food drive on Thursday.
The Collective is a prospective student group aiming to create a campus-wide network where students can donate or receive free resources, such as food, school supplies and gender-affirming care.
The Collective’s goal is to become an official University of Minnesota student-run organization for the 2025-26 academic year, according to President and Founder Joe Kyle. The Collective hopes its efforts will help reduce costs and promote self-managed access to essential goods and services for all students.
While still an unregistered student group, the Collective has been operating informally, holding weekly meetings and communicating via social media platforms Discord and Instagram.
Once it becomes a student group, the group hopes to host more events, including a library donation drive, a school supply drive and a winter clothing drive, Kyle said.
Kyle said anyone is welcome to join the Collective. He added he was inspired to start the club after participating in a gender-affirming clothing drive at the University. From that point on, Kyle held meetings with professors and student groups to discuss how to start the club, before promoting the Collective on Instagram in January 2025.
Kyle said the group is important to have on campus because students often deal with issues in affording everyday necessities like books, food and clothing.
“It’s expensive to afford housing here,” Kyle said. “It’s expensive to get the supplies that you need to be a student, and I think making people’s lives easier and more affordable, especially at a time in people’s lives when they don’t necessarily have access to a lot of income, is deeply important.”
Thursday’s food drive was held in collaboration with the University’s Student Co-op and student groups Students for Justice in Palestine and Young Democratic Socialists of America.
During the food drive, people could come to drop off food and cooking supplies at the Co-op on University Avenue or pick it up to take home for themselves free of charge. Kyle said the event was a good way to address food hunger on campus.
Kyle said he hopes the food drive can be a recurring event in the future.
“I think it’d be really great if this is just consistently a resource that people can show up and just get the resources they need,” Kyle said. “I think that would be something that would really help people, like, get access to the nutrition they need on campus.”
Co-op President and Collective member Osama Jerome said he joined the group to give back to the community.
The Student Co-Op is an affordable housing provider for students in need of housing. Since its reopening, Jerome said the Co-Op has been trying to provide students with more resources to address issues like food insecurity.
“I think that it’s good to give back to the community,” Jerome said. “So for me, it’s personally something that I find gratifying, and something that is helpful to me and to other people.”
Kyle said the Collective is a passion project and the idea of building something has given him a big sense of fulfillment over the past few years.
“The greatest feeling in the world is to just see people who are excited about this idea and are passionate about it too, because that gives me the sense that it will help people,” Kyle said. “That’s something that I would like to do, something that helps out a community that I’ve grown to really enjoy being in.”
Though he is confident the group will become a registered student group, Kyle said the Collective will continue its work nonetheless.
“We have not been a student organization this past semester and we are still moving forward with doing events that we’re passionate about and that doesn’t change if we don’t become a student group,” Kyle said.
