Story & Place + CU: Odyssey Project
In this series, HRI Director Antoinette Burton explores the 2025–26 theme “Story & Place” as it connects or intersects with the Champaign-Urbana community.
Feeding Body and Mind at Odyssey
One of the most remarkable aspects of the Odyssey Project, which is housed at HRI, is that it never fails to hold a mirror up to who we are—at the University of Illinois, and in Champaign-Urbana as well.
For almost twenty years, Odyssey students in our community have shown us the power of humanities courses to transform lives, to empower communities, and to make the case for the indispensable role of a humanities education in helping us make sense of where we live.
They remind us of the importance of access to the campus resources and opportunities which come along with their time in the Odyssey classroom. And Odyssey alums speak eloquently about their experiences with Illinois faculty and their fellow students and the impact those encounters have had on how they see our local community.
In short, Odyssey helps them, and those of us lucky enough to work with them, to understand how the stories we tell are shaped by the place we live, and how Champaign-Urbana shapes those stories themselves in the process.
At HRI we’ve had to consider the relationship between story and place with particular urgency in the last month, when it became clear how the capriciousness exhibited by the federal government and the courts over SNAP was coming home to Champaign-Urbana. During the recent government shutdown the Supreme Court suspended $4 billion in payouts to families who meet the eligibility requirements for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program.
Even now the fate of the program is uncertain. Across Illinois, SNAP recipients total almost 2 million people. Here in Champaign-Urbana, where food insecurity is an underlying condition, it’s a local version of the national story: there are 56,000 households enrolled in Nikki Budzinkski’s 13th congressional district, which includes the twin cities.
Like many other University of Illinois students, Odyssey scholars, their families, and their communities are at risk in the wake of the chaos and uncertainty around SNAP’s future.
But as ever, what happens at Odyssey holds a mirror up to the wider community. As we scrambled to get the word out about a food pantry for Odyssey students in Levis, we were inundated by information about the many organizations who were stepping up to help to guarantee that low-income individuals and families would have access to whatever they needed to keep food on the table.
Some of these places—Daily Bread Soup Kitchen, Wesley Foundation, Eastern Illinois Food Bank—know the story of hunger and food insecurity in Champaign County and environs all too well (for an extensive list see the Illinois Student Legal services website).
Others, like our wonderful next door neighbor, the Spurlock Museum, joined forces with us to link donors to the Odyssey food pantry in an effort to promote it beyond HRI.
If all politics is local, so too is all storytelling. And Odyssey students know that the SNAP story did not begin, and will not end, with the resolution of the government shut down.
Meanwhile, a big humanities payoff: when Odyssey students were directed toward the food pantry organized for them in Levis last week, Kate Spies (Odyssey’s academic advisor and student support coordinator) was able to remind them about the Odyssey Project’s Little Free Library in the office space on the first floor. So they left with shopping bags of food and also armfuls of books. Food for the body and the mind, and all the storytelling we can make of it—right here on West Illinois Street in Urbana.
Interested in donating to the Odyssey food pantry? Contact Kate Spies for more information.