The Leftovers Project: Tackling Food Insecurity at James Madison University
Soaring tuition costs, increasing loan rates, and dwindling government grant opportunities
are making it hard for many college students to afford basic living necessities. In 2003,
the National Library of Medicine reported that an alarming 19% - 56% of students (depending
on the specific college or university) were food insecure, meaning they lacked the nutrition
needed for a healthy and active lifestyle.
James Madison University (JMU) in Harrisonburg, Virginia sits in the middle of that range,
with 39% of its student population experiencing food insecurity. The good news is that JMU’s
dining halls always have leftovers, and a donation program allows students to donate food from
their meal plan to students who need a meal. Putting leftovers together with the students that
need food would be a simple, neat answer to a big problem.
The bad news is that student food insecurity exists inside a complex system of food distribution,
so solving it at JMU and other colleges and universities is anything but simple. Investigating
issues inside complex systems is what students in JMU’s Integrated Science and Technology (ISAT)
program learn to do using a system dynamics approach and Stella.
Defining a project scope
ISAT students take Introduction to Systems Thinking to learn how to apply modeling and simulation
to their area of focus: biotechnology, computing, energy, the environment, industrial
manufacturing, or public interest issues. In their junior and senior years, they take the Capstone
Experience classes, a two-year endeavor to study and model a real-world problem. The experience
culminates in a presentation at the College of Integrated Science and Engineering Senior
Symposium. It was during the first Capstone Experience class that Dr Raafat Zaini, Assistant
Professor, visited as a guest lecturer to give a project pitch to potential students.
In 2023, Dr. Zaini visited the first capstone class to deliver a lecture. "I pitched the capstone
project idea of looking at food waste and the possibility of sharing food with people who need it,"
says Zaini. Lorelai Lamoureux, a student in that class, was immediately interested. "Food has always
been important in my family. It’s a way of connecting with friends, family, and the local community,"
she says. "I recruited Isaiah Martinez and Raleigh Mann to work on the project with me and we asked
Dr. Zaini to be our advisor. He suggested we attend a regional conference on food waste which
featured a speaker from the JMU food pantry."
Lorelai Lamoureux, Isaiah Martinez, and Raleigh Mann
Through that conference, the team understood the scope of the general food insecurity problem
and decided to narrow their focus to their own campus. "Limiting our scope was an important
step," says Mann. "The greater food system includes humans, animal and vegetable production,
waste streams, and more. By focusing on the JMU campus, we had the right level of complexity
and were able to whittle down the problems."
Collecting data and building a model structure
The project started with a stakeholder analysis. "We wanted to know who had access to JMU data
and who makes decisions about how leftover food gets used," says Martinez. "We couldn’t get good
information about waste or leftovers. So, we started volunteering in the dining hall. Over a
number of weeks, we learned about how the dining hall worked and were able to collect some
actual data."
Still, data collection was a challenge. "In our weekly project meetings, there was the feeling
of a data crisis," says Zaini. "I reminded the students that models are not built of numerical
data and encouraged them to build a system structure that would reveal the questions they needed
to answer to find solutions."
While their focus was limited to the JMU campus, the students were still investigating a complex
system. It includes campus administration, a third-party dining hall vendor, multiple dining halls,
rules and regulations that guide food access and leftover distribution, a food pantry, and
thousands of students with a range of nutritional needs.
Most students access on-campus food through a pre-paid meal plan. When they enter the dining hall
and swipe their student id, a meal is deducted from their allotment. Students on the meal plan
are allowed to donate up to two meals (swipes) per day.
Lamoureux, Mann, and Martinez used what they learned about JMU’s food system to develop a
conceptual framework. It has three feedback loops that include students, dining halls, an
existing student food pantry, and food waste.
Conceptual framework with feedback loops
B1 relates students dining on campus and the JMU Food Pantry food supply. The more students
use the pantry, the more food the pantry serves. Conversely, the pantry can only serve the
food it has. When the pantry has less food, fewer students are served.
B2 relates the dining hall’s food supply to students. The more food students demand from
the dining halls leads to decreases in their supply. With less food in the dining hall
supply, fewer students can be served.
The framework served as a basis for the model, which includes both the movement of food
and students through the system. Food is accessed through dining halls and the food
pantry, donated to community organizations, thrown away, or composted. Students access
food and move in and out of food insecurity.
Since students rarely consume all food produced, there is waste, and the red connector
illustrates a pathway for food supply that did not previously exist. B3 illustrates
that food waste is available for the Food Pantry should policy allow, and creates an
outlet for food waste that was previously only accumulating (before the red connector
was added).
B4 relates the students dining on campus with the dining halls supply, the amount of food
waste produced and the JMU Food Pantry Supply. With more food waste produced from the dining
hall supply, more food has the potential to be donated to the food pantry which allows for
more students to be helped. However, this still creates a balancing loop as less students may
attend the dining halls which would lead to less food waste being produced from the dining
hall supply leading to less donations shared with the Food Pantry.
Top level feedback structure of JMU food distribution system
Evaluating the effectiveness of policy changes on food insecurity
Using the model, students simulated the flow of donations into the pantry and to students,
as well as student engagement in meal donation programs. JMU is currently experiencing student
population growth, so the model assumes increases in food production and in the number of food
insecure students. Through simulations, the team looked for a scenario that supported student
population growth and curbed both student food insecurity and food waste.
Sensitivity analyses measured the impact of changes to these parameters:
- Increases in donation rates from the dining hall to the food pantry
- Increases in allowed meal plan voucher donations (currently limited to two/day/student)
- Increases in the proportion of students who are willing to donate from their meal plan
- Increases in the number of students willing to access food through the pantry
- Decreases in the number of food insecure students
Findings suggested that simply raising the amount of dining hall food available to students
via the pantry would have an insignificant impact on student food insecurity. Increased
student awareness and willingness to donate food had a greater positive impact, as did an
increase in the number of students willing to access food through the pantry.
Policies guiding the use of dining hall and meal voucher donations to the food pantry were
also evaluated. Currently, the JMU Community Engagement and Volunteer Center (CEVC) operates
the university’s Food Recovery Network, which is a chapter of a national program. The Food
Recovery Network collects leftover dining hall food from the previous week. If more than 12
meals are collected, that food is donated to the Salvation Army. Food that makes up fewer
than 12 meals is donated to the JMU Food Pantry. Leftovers from self-serve stations must be
composted. Other policies affect food drop-off locations and current practices for publicizing
Food Pantry access.
Various policies—including increasing collaboration between dining halls and the JMU food
pantry, instituting a pantry awareness campaign, increasing willingness of students to donate
swipes, and increasing the amount of salvageable food served in dining halls—each decreased
the number of food insecure students by 6% - 8.5%. Food waste also decreased.
The greatest positive impact came when multiple policy changes were enacted. A Full JMU Pantry
Utilization solution simulated donations of all salvageable leftovers from both dining halls and
running an ongoing pantry awareness campaign to destigmatize usage and inspire student donations.
Together, those changes could reduce food security rates by at least 20%.
"A system dynamics approach using Stella allowed us to test the multiple resources that are
available as food insecurity solutions," says Martinez.
Learning through modeling
Students weren’t surprised that student food insecurity on the JMU campus couldn’t be solved
with the flick of one switch. "One of our professors, Rod McDonald, says ‘you don’t need a
silver bullet, you need silver buckshot,’" says Martinez. However, model building and simulation
did unlock insights.
"We began building the model with one dining hall and then added a second," says Martinez. "In
the course of making that change, we asked about getting food from one dining hall to the
other and were told that moving food would require a car and a key fob and overcoming other
logistics. In fact, the dining halls are a short walk apart. Food could be moved between them
in a grocery cart. It seems like a small thing but by asking questions raised by modeling, we
overcame the speed bump."
More surprising was how little food was donated. "Lorelai and Isaiah reported only about 12 Ziploc
bags of food went to the Salvation Army each day," says Zaini. "Just that from huge dining halls?"
"We did learn that the dining hall kitchen team is interested in minimizing food waste through
measures like using today’s leftover rice for tomorrow’s soup," says Martinez. "While we were
surprised by the low volume of leftovers, we saw that if both dining halls minimized waste,
it would have a positive impact."
"Given policies around food recovery, there is less food available to the pantry than we thought
there would be." says Lamoureux. "An important question that came out of simulation was if
donations could prioritize both students and community organizations so that the CEVC’s
mission of serving both could be preserved."
Why learn System Dynamics? Why learn to apply System Dynamics with Stella?
"System dynamics shows what anecdotes and data can’t show," says Mann. "By building a model,
you can see how a change in one part of the model cascades through the system. In the Leftovers
Project, for example, we saw that increasing the number of meals a student can donate each day
would change the number of food insecure students helped from tens to thousands."
"Stella is a fantastic communications tool and the barrier to entry is low," says Martinez. "With
no math or technical experience, you can build and explain a system that includes expertise to
people with no modeling experience. And, it gives everyone involved a common language for
collaboration and understanding."
"I learned to use three system dynamics software applications in graduate school," says Zaini.
"I keep using Stella because of its killer feature, storytelling. Storytelling allows groups
to simulate, learn, add to the model, simulate, learn, add to the model."
Storytelling also made it easy for the students to create slides and posters to present their
work. "Stella makes models that present well and trigger feedback," says Mann.
Presenting and using the model
Lamoureux, Martinez, and Mann presented their model and findings at the College of Integrated
Science and Engineering (CISE) Senior Symposium in the spring of 2025. They also presented at the
2025 Student Sustainability Summit at Bridgewater College and during the poster session of the 2025
International System Dynamics Conference in Boston, Massachusetts. "People reached out after each
presentation," says Martinez. "We continue to push for the model to be used by stakeholders."
Martinez, Mann and Lamoureux have all graduated from JMU and the ISAT program and moved on to
employment and graduate education. Their model, however, is not sitting on a shelf. "The Leftovers
Project is just the beginning in our understanding of the student food insecurity and waste problem
and possible solutions," says Zaini.