After over 10 years of student advocacy, UC Santa Barbara is launching a pilot meal swipes rollover, donation and sharing program in the fall quarter. A random sample of 10% of meal swipe holders will be able to opt into the program.
UCSB is launching a pilot program for meal swipe rollovers, donations and sharing in the fall quarter. Shiuan Cheng / Daily Nexus
The new program follows a 4-3-2 formula. Four meal swipes each week are able to roll over — to be used the next week instead of defaulting to the weekly allowance — three are able to be donated to the Associated Students (A.S.) Basic Needs Food Bank and two can be shared between students.
UCSB’s Young Democratic Socialists of America (YDSA) co-chair and fourth-year political science major Isabella Ferraro said to be eligible to receive the meal swipe donations, students will sign a form at the beginning of the year attesting to food insecurity. It is not dependent on financial aid status. She said at the beginning of the fall quarter, the campus will provide a “reasonable amount” of meal swipes for the program, instead of relying solely on student donations.
The new pilot program comes after nearly a year of grassroots campaigning by the UC Santa Barbara chapter of campus Young Democratic Socialists of America, including campus rallies and a petition that garnered support from over 10% of the student body.
Campus dining is testing out the reforms through a pilot program to understand if student behavior will increase the overall costs in their dining formula, according to Ferraro. Previous efforts to bring rollovers failed as campus dining expressed concerns that rollovers would increase the costs of meal swipe packages for students.
Additionally, UCSB previously had a meal swipe donation program from 2013-2020 through A.S. Basic Needs with aid from a nonprofit called Swipe Out Hunger. Housing, Dining & Auxiliary Enterprises (HDA) collected spare meal swipes through a form and shared it with Swipe Out Hunger. The nonprofit then donated funds to the A.S. Food Bank to buy those excess swipes at a subsidized price. That program was slashed due to budget cuts during the pandemic.
“The reason we did the pilot program is because the school was feeling very uncertain in our initial meetings about what the financial implications are and what that means for students,” Ferraro said. “We don’t want it to be a ton of money for students because that wasn’t the point.”
UCSB is one of two UC campuses alongside UC Berkeley to not have meal swipe rollovers. As 48% of undergraduates and 31% of graduate students face food insecurity on campus, YDSA felt it was imperative to petition for reforms back in February. YDSA had over 2,200 student signatories within a month of the petition. Since then, they held rallies on campus at dining buildings and garnered more support for their petition throughout the remainder of the 2023-24 school year.
YDSA was able to meet with administration in April and talk through their concerns after initially being told rollovers disrupt the dining hall’s funding formula. Executive Director of Campus Dining Jill Horst, Associate Vice Chancellor Willie Brown and Director of Student Life Katya Armistead were among the parties at the meeting. Ferraro said that in these meetings, Brown said the program could be price-neutral, meaning the program wouldn’t cost campus dining more than its current budget.
“I feel somewhat hopeful that that’s the truth because I think (as of) now, students feel that they have to eat a ton of food because they can’t eat later,” Ferraro said. “If everybody was eating with normal health patterns, I don’t think having rollover is gonna make people eat tens of thousands of tons more food that the school has to buy.”
Since sending over a pilot proposal authored by YDSA and A.S. Basic Needs in May, the proposal hasn’t significantly changed or conceded anything, Ferraro said.
“I think we were pretty much on a very similar page with them about everything. Which was really nice that it wasn’t this prolonged struggle. It was just trying to work toward a mutual goal of helping people,” Ferraro said.
How will the pilot program evaluate the success of the meal swipe rollover, donation, and sharing program, and what Wordle Unlimited factors will be considered in determining whether to expand it to all students?