Swipe Out Hunger: Rachel Sumekh

Founded by a group of friends at University of California Los Angeles in 2010, Swipe Out Hunger is a leading nonprofit addressing hunger among college students. The Five-O-One, joined by Swipe CEO Rachel Sumekh dives into food insecurity on campuses, and how this organization has reached more than 120 colleges and has served 2 million nutritious meals to date.

To learn more about their work visit www.swipehunger.org.

Talia: So it's possible that you've never heard of Rachel Sumekh before, but if you're a college student, it's likely that you have heard of the swipe drive, now, on 120 campuses across the country, enabling students to donate their extra meal plan swipes to their peers who face food insecurity. Rachel, thanks for joining us today. Now, I know that you are now in 38 states, but this all started in Los Angeles where you grew up. An estimated 2 million people in Los Angeles County live with food insecurity, that means that one in five people who live there may not know where their next meal is coming from. Rachel, I'm curious, is this something that you were aware of and felt around you as you were growing up in Los Angeles?

Rachel: I would start by saying no. It was something that I always saw but didn't feel was personal. A couple of years ago my mom told me that our family benefited from SNAP, formerly known as food stamps, for almost two years. I was the kid in kindergarten that had the little yellow free lunch ticket, but I didn't think it was a big deal. I thought everyone got free lunch on this program of SNAP. Our free lunches at school were the safety net, it gave my parents a peace of mind to know that their kids were okay, that they had a meal, and that they can go off and achieve the American dream. I never felt like we didn't have enough even though my parents who immigrated to the US often struggled, they never let us see that.

Talia: And so you then go to UCLA for college, and what was it there on campus that made you cognizant about food insecurity issues.

Rachel: When a student lives in the dorms on campus, they're required to buy a meal plan, and that meal plan gets them access to a dining hall. And I noticed very quickly when I got to UCLA, that there are some students on campus that had access to this dining hall, and this incredible selection of food — If you're ever in LA, please come and I'll take you to the UCLA dining hall — and some students were relying on ramen noodles. And the trope of you know, students romanticizing the ramen noodle diet, or being a broke college student, didn’t it make sense to me when I knew that if I didn't eat that day, I wasn't gonna do well on my test, I wasn't able to focus in class. We began to question this romanticized notion that it's okay for a student to rely on ramen noodles, especially when there are amazing dining halls on campus. The average meal plan costs more than $4,000 a year, and what that means is you buy a package of meal plans, maybe it's 19, or 20 meals every week, and if you don't use all of those meals in that week, they roll over to the next and the next and by the end of the year, many students including many of my friends had 100 or 50, or even five meal swipes leftover. At the end of the semester, the school says In exchange, you can get a blender or you can get two water bottles, and students would walk out of the convenience store with a bunch of stuff that they weren't even going to use.

Talia: So I'm not sure many of our listeners understand what these meal plans actually are. Can you explain how much they cost for students, and if they aren't used by the end of the semester, what happens to those funds?

Rachel: The school never gave you an opportunity to get a refund for those dollars that you paid for, Or you took out loans to pay for. UCLA at the time, studies were showing that one in four, one in four students at a prestigious top university were food insecure — they didn't have enough to eat. So we decided to convince the campus to give us another option.

Talia: And were the campuses willing to give you another option?

Rachel: Absolutely that. It was a very tough process getting them on board. It started with us going into the dining hall and physically buying to-go boxes of food, which we then handed out to anyone we saw who was hungry in the community on campus. Eventually we set up a table outside one of the dining halls. We said this is our money, we should be able to decide what happens with it. And one day, we had a mountain of white styrofoam boxes, this is in 2010, before, schools were all recyclable and styrofoam was still a thing. And we had one of the managers of a dining hall, come up to our table, see what we were doing, and smash one of the to-go boxes and said, “you're not allowed to do this on my campus stop immediately.” If I'm doing something good, and this person is telling me that I shouldn't do it, then maybe the rules aren't just and maybe this is something worth pushing for. A crew of us got together and began to lobby the administration, “can you give us the chance to donate these meals?

Talia: So I guess what I'm not understanding is why would a campus be unwilling to offer their students the opportunity to donate those meals?

Rachel: On college campuses, food is a revenue source, which when you have students going hungry, we believe is slightly unethical. And so we were able to get the university to buy into this program, because we came to the table, we did our homework, and we said, how do we work together — we came to the table with a sense of partnership, and that's how we developed this new model: instead of having to purchase the food and non-perishable boxes, now we're able to do an electronic transfer of those funds from our meal plan to other students. We work with social service centers on campus, who know students that are food insecure, and we make sure that they get these meals to those students. And the impact there is transformative. It's also the physical impact on them; I always think about one student who said, because I was able to get a meal swipe at night, I'm able to work out in the mornings, because now I have energy when I wake up.

Talia: And those students who struggle with hunger, is this something that's new for them? Have they struggled with food insecurity their entire lives? Or is this a phenomenon that crops up when they are on their own for the first time in college?

Rachel: There are 30 million students in our Kindergarten-12th grades who rely on their school meals every day. So what happens when a student graduates from their local high school and then goes to a local state school? The food security hasn't changed. They're still experiencing the same levels of hunger. And so when folks question how are students going hungry? How do you say that one in three college students in the United States, our food insecure, it's being reminded that in our K-12 system, we know this is an issue, and we're addressing it there. And if we want students who worked so hard to get to college, to graduate, we need supports there as well.

Talia: I'd like to pivot a bit and talk about the organization today. I know that to date, you've helped hungry college students eat almost 2 million meals in over 120 campuses in 38 states. Can you explain what that growth has been like?

Rachel: Like most movement building, it was slow, and then a quick ramp up. So our work at UCLA was a great model. We spent two years there, we learned all the best practices for how to work with administration, and then our friends at USC — we play nice on both sides of the city, UCLA and USC are both strong partners of Swipe efforts. Our growth was just through Facebook posts getting shared, and in 2012, we were invited to the White House and recognized as champions of change by the President. And it was this incredible moment when we went from feeling like we were kids who are breaking the rules, because that's what UCLA told us we were doing, to now being recognized as people who are blazing a trail, who are lifting up an issue and providing an innovative and effective model for addressing that. From that point, I think our own perspective shifted. If we want this to scale, we can't just see ourselves as troublemakers, we have to build a strong organization.

Talia: Today now that you do have that strong organization, what would you say has been the greatest challenge that Swipe Out Hunger has faced?

Rachel: We got the chance to educate a lot of university leaders to understand that now nationally many studies, including one from the Government Accountability Office, showed that one in three college students regularly experience hunger on community college campuses. Where a majority of our college students are it's one in two. Our biggest challenge was that most university leaders aren't the ones that went through hunger when they were in school; they probably came from academic families, they likely weren't first generation, and that's changing — the face of higher education is slowly changing. But it took many years. I would say at one point, the progression was university leaders saying this is not an issue, to them saying okay, fine, it's an issue but it's not my responsibility, to them saying okay, fine, what do we do about it? And now they're saying we're so proud to say that we have a Swipe program, and that we have a social worker on campus who's dedicated to basic needs. And so the tides are changing and our growth is much correlated to that normalization of this phrase of basic needs, making sure that college students have their basic needs met.

Talia: Can you share with us what Swipe Out Hunger looks like today?

Rachel: Now we're at the point where we have contracts with huge tech companies that are moving those electronic meal swipes from one account to another. If we had believed that the first version of our nonprofit and our model was the best version, we wouldn't be where we are today. And so I think anyone who's listening, who's ever built something, knows that testing and iterating and iterating is the key to success if you're trying to have an impact. I think as a leader, there's this part of you who wants to hold on to that initial version of something. One of the things that I learned when I just had a million coffee meetings with anyone who would scheduled time with me — I was 21, when I decided to start working on swipe out hunger full time — and through these coffee meetings, I learned that everyone is going to give you very different perspectives. And it wasn't so much about accepting their feedback as truth, but it was about learning how to accept feedback as a way of strengthening your work.

Talia: And as you evolve, I know that you're working closely with the students in your network, teaching them about advocacy. Is there any example of that work that you could share with our listeners?

Rachel: At the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, the students there reached out to start a Swipe program. And then eventually they went to their campus and said, “we want to start an entire basic needs coalition. We're going to ask for staffing, we're going to ask for resources, we're going to ask for awareness. We want people to know that at our campus where we have such school spirit, we don't let people just suffer in silence.” Those students, they came to our student summit where we taught them all about policy and advocacy, and they went back and said, “what if we came up with our own bill?” And so they drafted a bill and they socialized it on campus. And someone said, “why don't you take it to the State Senate”. And so they took it to their state house, and they were successfully able to introduce a bill. And, of course, because of COVID, all the bills kind of paused. But it was a student who starts with one program, who builds a coalition, gets their friends involved, understands policy, and then writes a bill — and less than 100 bills are introduced in Tennessee every year, and now one of them, which is focused on introducing food banks onto college campuses, was bought to the State House.

Talia: And, Rachel, you just mentioned COVID, and I do want to get into that because I know a lot of your work centers around helping students on campus, but as we know, a lot of students left their campuses this past spring due to the pandemic. So I'm wondering how your team has responded to the displacement of the students that they support.

Rachel: Everyone has had to adapt. Those who've been the hardest hit are large institutions like our schools and universities. And when our universities closed, we suddenly became aware of the fact that we no longer have the mechanism through which we were previously reaching students. Last year alone, we served more than 200,000 meals, and it broke my heart to think about where our students going to get those meals this year. Now that they're at home, we can't really reach them. And so one of the things that we're launching is a student navigator network, where we're training students who lost their internships or have lost jobs, who are in our network, to serve as navigators to help the hundreds of students who've been asking for support, to help them go through the process of how to get SNAP. SNAP, formerly known as food stamps, is a federally funded program that makes sure that students and everyone are able to get access to food. One of my favorite stats: for every meal that a food bank provides in America, SNAP provides nine. And so when we think about supporting our food banks, which we absolutely should do, especially right now, we also want to provide focus and a lens on the program called SNAP, that anyone who's low income is eligible for. Our pivot was saying, no longer do we have the campus structure to help us navigate how we serve meals, so we have to build our own structure.

Talia: Rachel, we only have time for one last question. Here it goes: nonprofits like Swipe Out Hunger require donations from individual donors and foundations to keep the lights on for their organizations. For all those donors out there listening, can you tell them what you would do with a gift of $1 million?

Rachel: I would do two things with $1 million. First, I would do all the outreach necessary to get more students to know that they're eligible for SNAP. There are millions of students that are eligible for SNAP who are currently not accessing it simply because they don't know. And secondly, we would do some advocacy. Currently, students can't get SNAP unless they're working 20 hours a week, which is crazy to be a full time student and have to prove that you work 20 hours a week. We would educate our lawmakers, because their perception of who a college student is right now isn't that first generation students, this law was passed decades ago when the image of a college student was very different than what it is today. And then we would ramp up our growth. Even in the in the times of COVID, Universities still are reaching out to us and are still launching Swipe Out Hunger programs, and every dollar donated to Swipe Out Hunger leads to one meal. At this moment when we know so many students will need help once they return to campus, we need our program there and to have a presence — every penny of that million dollars will help us get to more campuses and help reach more students. We're going to need more than a million, but that's an amazing boost to get us started.