Since being instated at the start of this academic year, the UC Santa Barbara mealswipe donation program has collected 932 swipes and distributed 446 meal vouchers. According to the Associated Students Food Bank Interim Coordinator Crystal Bach, this program provides a short-term solution for students in need of a meal.

Through the pilot program, anyone with a dining plan can volunteer to donate up to three meal swipes a week by filling out a form on the Campus Dining website. Shengyu Zhang / Daily Nexus
Through the pilot program, anyone with a dining plan can volunteer to donate up to three meal swipes a week by filling out a form on the Campus Dining website. The form opens on Monday at 7 a.m. and closes on Thursday at noon each week. These donations translate into meal vouchers that students may apply for via a form on the Associated Students (A.S.) Food Bank website a maximum of three times a quarter.
“It’s all self-declared need. There’s no need to provide us with any more context of your situation,” Bach said. “We kind of wanted to remove the barrier of having students bear that emotional burden of sharing all that and just making it as accessible as possible.”
Once students fill out the meal swipe voucher form, they may have to wait up to a week to be approved, at which point they must pick up their physical voucher at the Food Bank. Meal vouchers may be used at any of the three dine-in dining commons — Portola, De La Guerra or Carillo. All donated meal swipes not used within three months will expire.
“It’s not meant to be a long-term solution. It’s more of a short-term solution. And by applying to the program, we also share multiple resources that students can access, and hopefully, by having them pick it up through the pantry, they also have that first-hand encounter with some of the resources we share,” Bach said.
UCSB Young Democratic Socialists of America (YDSA) alongside A.S. Student Advocate General, previous senator and chair of the Basic Needs Committee, third-year computer science major Alvin Wang were key players in proposing the pilot program last spring.
This comes after over a decade of mealswipe reform advocacy on campus, as UCSB is one of only two University of California (UC) campuses that do not offer any kind of rollover, the other being UC Berkeley.
YDSA put out a petition last February for campus dining halls to implement meal swipe rollovers which garnered support from over 10% of the student body. Through multiple meetings between administrators, Housing, Dining and Auxiliary Enterprises (HDAE), Wang and the A.S. Food Bank, YDSA’s pilot program proposal was approved for this academic year.
The program is modeled after a pre-pandemic Food Bank program from 2013 to 2020 where students could donate up to three meal swipes each week. The program — run by HDAE — was shut down due to budget cuts.
YDSA and Executive Director of Campus Dining for Housing, Dining & Auxiliary Enterprises Jill Horst did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Outreach efforts for the program included a social media push and an email to students from UCSB Housing. Bach said that since the program now is fully functioning, she wants to expand publicity and hand out more vouchers. So far, 396 swipes were donated in October, 398 in November and 138 in December, according to Bach.
“I think we were kind of just trying to test the waters and see what the engagement has been like. Right now it is going really well. We just finished giving out vouchers from the first batch, so now we’re on the second batch. They’re kind of going out as we’re getting them,” Bach said.
In addition to mealswipe donations, a mealswipe rollover pilot program is currently in place through Spring, allowing a select 10% of dining plan holders to share two swipes per week and rollover four swipes per week.
The pilot programs will continue through to the end of the year, at which point data from the donations will be evaluated before pushing to make the program permanent, according to Wang. Bach expressed excitement about the program and wants to see automated communication between applicants for increased efficiency and accuracy.
“The few people I have spoken to were very excited about the program and are happy that it’s something that was brought back,” Bach said. “I think there’s just the general buzz and excitement that it’s coming back to students.”
A version of this article appeared on p. 1 of the Jan. 23, 2025 edition of the Daily Nexus.