Rollover, Donations, & Sharing: Meal Swipe Reform is Coming to UCSB

Story and photo by Joyce Chi || Listen on SoundCloud

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At UC Santa Barbara, where 48% of undergrads and 31% of grad students face food insecurity, there have been efforts to achieve meal swipe reform since at least 2006. That year, according to the Daily Nexus, an Associated Students representative named Nathaniel Wood-Wilde advocated for meal swipe rollovers. It was not successful then, as the university raised concerns that rollovers would increase the cost of meal plans.

Then in 2020, the AS Senate unanimously passed a resolution in favor of rollovers, but that was unsuccessful too.

Now finally, meal swipe reform is coming to UCSB, in the form of rollovers, donations, and sharing. This is thanks to grassroots advocacy led by the campus chapter of the Young Democratic Socialists of America, or YDSA, in collaboration with the AS Basic Needs Committee. To learn more, I talked to YDSA’s upcoming co-chair and outreach chair, Isabella Ferraro and Isabelle Prittie.

FERRARO: Yeah, I’m Isabella. I’m a fourth year political science major, and I’m going to be the co-chair for the second year at UCSB YDSA, which is Young Democratic Socialists of America. 

PRITTIE: My name is Isabelle, and I’m an second year political science major, and I’m going to be the outreach chair for the upcoming 2024-25 school year.

I asked why YDSA chose to focus on the issue of meal swipe reform.

Isabella, YDSA’s co-chair, talked about how UCSB’s meal plan differed from other UCs. Prior to this meal swipe reform, UCSB was one of two campuses (along with UC Berkeley) to not offer rollovers, where unused meal swipes for one week would “roll over” to the next. UCSB and UC San Diego were also the only two to not allow meal swipe sharing.

FERRARO: I don’t know if you’ve ever visited a different UC, but a bunch of people who had were like, “oh, it’s so much better at pretty much every other school,” and their friends were saying, you know, “I can’t believe that it’s like that where you are…”

Isabella also said that many of YDSA’s members have meal plans themselves, as first or second years or through employment at the dining halls.

YDSA then moved to surveying students about meal swipe reform. Here’s Isabelle, YDSA’s outreach chair.

PRITTIE: We were getting some really shocking responses back in from students who had a meal plan and were saying that they weren’t able to, through that meal plan, have enough food to sustain themselves throughout the week. We had some people saying that they were getting faint biking back to their dorms. We had a lot of people saying that they had leftover meal swipes at the end of every week. We had some people saying that they didn’t have enough meal swipes. So just a lot of feedback kind of saying that the plan that we had originally was flawed, and that was something that we needed to work on.

FERRARO: One thing that really stood out to me was multiple people in different ways saying that it had worsened an eating disorder, because that was just very startling to hear just from, you know, completely different people filling it out over the course of the like month that we had it independently. 

The survey was on YDSA’s Instagram, but members also took to doing walkthroughs, where they did door knocking in dorms.

FERRARO: So you just knock on each door, you have a little conversation with this person at the end. You’re like, “hey, can you fill out this survey?” And that was how we got it. I think we had over like 150 people fill that out through just door knocking and having it on Instagram.

With the results of the survey, YDSA published a petition and obtained signatures through Instagram, more dorm walkthroughs, and more tabling.

FERRARO: We were like, “Hey, I don’t know if you’ve heard about this thing that we’re trying to do, but we have a petition for it. Do you feel that this is something relevant to you? Do you support this kind of cause?” And the day was published, I think we got like in the hundreds of responses. 

Here’s Isabelle talking more about tabling.

PRITTIE: I think that was a really good way of like connecting to people at UCSB, because we tabled outside the dining hall. So we were catching all the people who had the meal plans. And through that, we were kind of able to learn how widely felt it was. Everyone we talked to, like Isabella said, had a very strong response.

The petition, which garnered over two thousand signatures, called for meal swipe rollover, sharing, and donation. UCSB previously had a meal swipe donation program, where students could donate up to three swipes to the AS Food Bank. The cost was subsidized by a third-party non-profit called Swipe Out Hunger. This pre-pandemic program, though, ended due to budget cuts, according to the Nexus.

10 other campus organizations endorsed YDSA’s petition, including the AS Basic Needs Committee’s Chair Alvin Wang (now the Student Advocate General) and Campus Projects Liaison Denise Corrales.

FERRARO: They were a big part of it. They helped us write our proposals and get the actual meetings with admin.

YDSA says they had these meetings over the course of two to three months. Here’s Isabella again.

FERRARO: The first one was honestly just laying the groundwork of admin being like, “Well, this is why things are the way they are now. We actually have it in such a way that it’s as cheap as possible.” And then us saying like, “Well, what do you mean by that? What about donation? You guys literally had that a couple of years ago. How is it, you know, can you tell us the actual details of why it’s gone?”

So that was a lot of it is actually getting on the same page with them, because sometimes the school information is not transparent at all. So that was a big part of it. And then we honestly just ran out of time at that first meeting, figuring out how to navigate everything.

And then the next one was a lot more concrete, like getting some real timeline going about like, “OK, these are the things we want. And how can we work to make this happen?” And Alvin was one of the people that proposed, like, “we should offer to have a pilot proposal.”

And so that was a big way that we were able to actually make some real concrete advancements, because it was less just being like, “we want this.” And them being like, “We don’t know if we even could afford that. Or if that is logical.” We were able to say, “Well, what if you tried this? Because you have no idea of what the implications of it are, because it’s not tested.”

And so we offered them that idea, and they were receptive to it. I think it was like a week later, we submitted it to them and worked to schedule another meeting where we would hammer out what they were comfortable with and their response to it.

And I think that Admin was really, really receptive to that, which was really nice to feel like that effort and that student support was listened to. We honestly were very pleasantly surprised at how easy that part of it was, because we basically wrote down everything we had hoped for in the reforms into a pilot proposal, which was rollover, sharing, and donation. 

The finalized 4-3-2 proposal is as follows.

The meal swipe donation program has been “immediately reinstated,” according to YDSA’s Instagram, with meal plan holders being able to donate three swipes a week to the AS Food Bank. Unlike the previous program that involved a third party non profit, this current program will be done internally by UCSB’s Housing, Dining, and Auxiliary Enterprises (or HDAE). 

In a statement on behalf of HDAE, UCSB spokesperson Kiki Reyes said that this program would be voucher based, and that Campus Dining and the AS Food Bank would work together to determine how to best distribute these vouchers in accordance with Food Bank eligibility standards. Reyes said, “by partnering with the Food Bank as the distributors, we can ensure eligible students in need will receive these donations.”

The upcoming winter quarter will see a pilot program where four meals a week can be rolled over and two meals a week can be shared with any UCSB student. Reyes explained that ten percent of residential meal plan holders and ten percent of off-campus meal plan holders will be randomly offered the chance to participate in this pilot program. 

Data from this study will be used to determine how to implement the reforms for all students in the 2025-2026 school year and beyond.

When asked what changed the university’s perspective on the issue of meal swipe reform, UCSB spokesperson Kiki Reyes said that HDAE “has always considered student perspectives and needs when designing meal plans and remains open to conversations about our practices to best serve UCSB students.”

Reyes highlighted the  “collaborative discussions” between AS, YDSA, the Residential Housing Association, and university leadership to develop the pilot programs, which would “allow our team to implement changes without significant disruptions to our operations.” Additionally, Reyes stated on behalf of HDAE, “we appreciate the opportunity to partner with student leaders to improve our meal plan options.”

I asked Isabelle and Isabella which parts of the campaign they were most proud of.

PRITTIE: I like tabling a lot. I was involved in the tabling for the petition and for the survey in the beginning. And I really like that because there was a chance to connect with the students that we were actually affecting. Our whole campaign from the very start was about the students.

This is really an issue that is by the students, for the students. It was really nice being able to go on table and connect with the meal plan holders and find out what it is that they wanted and what they had issue with in the meal plan. 

FERRARO:  I’d have to say a pretty similar thing myself. Door knocking with people was really fun, getting to talk to people about their experience with it. I think a big part of that is that, as students ourselves and in interacting with other students, you’re trying to give people the building blocks or the tools to be able to do these kinds of things, like to try and change things around them. So that was a big part of it. 

People were like, “Yeah, this is bad and something should be done about it.” It’s just one of those things that’s kind of bad, and you don’t even think that it’s possible for anything to change. You’re just like this is the era around me. You don’t even like notice it.

That’s a big part of it, is that it does feel really meaningful to see people who they hear about something and they’re like, “I want to be a part of this and I want to get like really engaged.” That’s really meaningful and ideally that transforms into continued engagement with — it feels weird to say politics or something like this, but I do think it is politics, because it’s food insecurity. 

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FERRARO: I’m really proud of what we were able to do with this program. But I also think it’s important to connect it with why we chose to engage in this.

Obviously we care about it, but we’re not doing this as like some poor like charity case thing that we’re doing for the school. It’s that the students in our club are in large part working class students, students who would greatly benefit from this being a thing and who see it as in line with our ideals of socialism and democracy. 

That’s a big part of it, is making the school kind of more democratic, because it really felt in that first meeting that the admin was kind of like, “No, you just don’t understand. This is the way things have to be.”

And it clearly wasn’t because, by our second and third meetings, they were like, “You know, you’re right, this is kind of fun.” Not to downplay it, but they seemed to think it was actually a super good idea once we talked about it a little more and emphasized that 10% of students were on board with our program. That’s something important to me is connecting it to our values as a club — why we do anything.

PRITTIE: This is, I think, a really big organizing win on the part of the club and it’s something that a lot of us are really proud of. It’s good work that is reaching a lot of people, and it’s going to hopefully positively impact a lot of people and create better situations in people’s lives. And I think that’s kind of what this organizing is all about.