In February 2019, Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT) visited UCONN to discuss food insecurity.  Nationally, 1 in 3 college students are food insecure, while up to 1 in 5 Connecticut students may be facing food insecurity.  Food insecurity is a measure of the availability of food and an individuals’ ability to access it, or the state of being unable to have reliable access to sufficient amounts of affordable and nutritious food.  Wanjiku Gatheru ‘20 and Abhishek Gupta ‘20 created a survey to investigate what role food insecurity played on the UCONN Storrs campus.  

45% of respondents were unable to eat healthy or nutritious food because they lacked resources.  

30% had to skip meals.

31% faced a time when they were hungry but did not eat because they did not have enough money.

One of the programs at Uconn that helps address this issue is the Uconn Swipes initiative.  If you are a UCONN student with flex passes on your meal plan, you are eligible to donate one to the Uconn Swipes program.  The program aims to give students who are food insecure or experiencing an emergency situation access to healthy meals in campus dining halls.  They are given 25 meal plan swipes, which can be rolled over to next semester if they do not use them all up.  While it is a good program, there are a few necessary changes that need to be made.  

1.  Students should be allowed to donate a max of 5 swipes.  During a typical semester, when the dining halls and university are operating normally, students are only allowed to donate 1 swipe at most.  According to a recent survey conducted among Uconn students who currently or once had a meal plan, 60% of people said they would be willing to donate 6+ swipes and 33% of people said they had between 10 and 19 swipes left over for any given semester.  

2.  There should be 3 donation drive days throughout the semester.  During a typical semester, there is only 1 day that students can donate swipes, and now there is talk of increasing these donation days to 2, but we believe 3 would allow for more people to donate some of their swipes.  Students may choose to donate more or less swipes depending on when the drive takes place during the semester.  According to the same survey previously mentioned, 37% of students accumulate and use a lot of swipes at the end of the semester and 51% of people said they forget about their leftover swipes at the end of a semester.  From this it seems like more people would be willing to donate towards the end of the semester, but it would be smart to have one at the beginning and middle of the semester as well for those who may run out of swipes towards the end of the semester.

We call on Uconn dining admins and directors to implement these changes or allow us the chance to meet with them to discuss these proposed changes.  Please sign if you agree with our end goal and to help spread awareness of this issue.