Students Helping Oz Peers (SHOP) is holding a drive for the month of March collecting arts and crafts supplies for children to use during the school year.

The drive was organized and promoted by two student interns at SHOP, Avery David, who is the SHOP Operations intern, handling inventory and day-to-day operations and Marie Tata, the marketing and promotions intern, who handles the social media aspect as well as brainstorming ideas for events. They both started their internships at SHOP this past fall. 

“It’s mainly a brainchild of Avery,” Tata said. However, she was responsible for the promotional material made for the drive such as posters, flyers and digital advertisements as well as designing the donation boxes themselves. Tata is responsible for many of the SHOP flyers and advertisements seen around campus. 

To ensure sure the materials SHOP was collecting would be useful, they communicated with staff at the Children’s Center of Oswego and asked directly what supplies were needed.  

There are four different places around campus where donations are accepted: SHOP (3 Penfield Library), The Penfield Library front desk, 501 Culkin Hall and The Compass (145 Marano Campus Center). All of which are open for donation through normal operating hours.

“We’ve collected a good amount, it’s a slow start,” David said, when asked how much SHOP had collected through the drive so far. 

The drive runs from March 1 until March 31 although David had said they were “going to give it a little time”. Meaning they were still accepting donations. 

David said that interning at SHOP has been a very meaningful experience: “It’s a good feeling to be able to help somebody, just even make that small difference,” as well as having helped him branch out, connect with students and gain a new perspective on food insecurity. 

SHOP, as a whole, is a student-run initiative to address food and clothing insecurity on our campus and has made a huge impact in doing so. Starting in 2016, SHOP has distributed thousands of pounds of food and served over 500 people throughout the 2025 academic year as well as offering personal hygiene products. 

SHOP is funded and supplied by donations, local food banks, grants that are spent on inventory and through collaborations with other organizations that David said happen frequently. Some organizations SHOP collaborates with includes the Office of Sustainability, Career Services and recently the Newman Center.

SHOP holds similar drives to the SHOP School Supply Drive regularly and will be holding a few more throughout this semester. A clothing drive being set-up by a volunteer for a class, along with a pop-up thrift swap shop, meaning you bring fall or winter clothes and they’ll provide you spring or summer clothes, which is a collaboration with the Office of Sustainability, held from April 29-30.

SHOP has recently partnered with Stewert’s Shops who have provided 25 certificates for milk and 25 for eggs that will be distributed at SHOP events, as well as partnering with  O’Reilly’s Auto Parts’ Oswego location which now offers a discount for SUNY Oswego students. 

A SHOP pop-up will be held in the Lakeside Commons on April 9, which Tata said will help reach students off campus who might not know where SHOP is located.

  “We know how hard it can be, living off campus, and not really having access to things, ‘cause you’re paying rent.”

SHOP also holds events that are holiday related such as the Halloween Bash, which offered fun activities for students along with donations being made throughout the event, garnering around 70 attendees and the Thanksgiving Bag Program, which was updated this past year to allow students to pick what came in their bag instead of having premade bags. SHOP Manager April Lopez said this change encouraged students to come retrieve their bags which many did not do in previous years. 

Tata said that her and David are graduating this semester, meaning they will need to “pass on the torch” to new interns. Anyone who is interested can apply on Handshake.com and anyone that would like to volunteer short-term at SHOP should check out certain GST courses that provide class credit for volunteering. Anyone interested in these opportunities that have any questions should contact shop@oswego.edu.