The Just Us Graduate Student Dinners emerged from a recognition of the quiet crisis of food insecurity and isolation many graduate students—especially Global Majority, low-income, first-generation, and international students—experience. Academia often disembodies students, extracting them from their cultural food traditions and support networks while offering little institutional concern for whether they are nourished in mind and body. 

 

Just Us was founded with a dual goal. First, to surface mutual aid networks that already exist among students and second to advocate for institutional change to better support graduate student food security. Through shared meals and facilitated conversations, participants will unearth stories of food traditions, articulate their needs, and organize for concrete changes—whether through meal plans, stipends, or alternative food access programs.

 

By partnering with campus affinity centers and guest facilitators to host dinners throughout the semester, food stories serve as an invitation to dialogue. Just Us seeks to be more than just a meal—it is a movement toward re-rooting students through a sense of belonging, collective care, and food justice advocacy within the university.