Swipe2Care: Northeastern’s broken solution to food insecurity

On March 27, third-year political science and economics combined major Joshua Sisman tried to donate his extra meal swipes on Northeastern’s Swipe2Care website. He was greeted with a highlighted, bold message: “Meal donations are currently not available.”

The Swipe2Care initiative was proposed and implemented in 2018 by the Student Government Association, Northeastern Dining Services and Northeastern Student Affairs with the aim of fighting food insecurity on campus. However, over the past four years, the current iteration of Swipe2Care has proven ineffective, as one in four students continue to face food insecurity according to a 2021 SGA poll.

The basic design of Swipe2Care allows students to donate their excess swipes, which other students can request access to. When requesting, students must indicate the number of meals they desire and the circumstances surrounding their request. The requests are then subject to approval by Northeastern Dining Services.

Despite its apparent simplicity, students report that swipes can take up to 10 days to be transferred to a husky card from the time of request and only undergraduates are permitted to use the program. Students can also be denied swipes if their situation does not meet the university’s criteria. The university did not provide comment on these issues. 

As a result of these myriad issues, students continue to face food insecurity and struggle when deciding how to use their swipes.

“Sometimes I find myself deciding, can I have a bag of chips or a spoonful of peanut butter to hold me off,” said first-year chemistry major Lydia Gomez. “You need to plan and count it out in your head to make sure you don’t run out [of meal swipes].”

Another key problem with Swipe2Care is its obscurity. Many students claim that they don’t know how the program works, either for donating swipes or receiving them.

“I don’t know anything about how to apply for it,” Gomez said. “[Northeastern] doesn’t advertise how you can apply for Swipe2Care, how it works or how you can get your meal swipes.”

When Swipe2Care works as designed, some students could get the swipes they need. One Reddit post was filled with comments commending the program, sharing that Swipe2Care has provided them with a work-around to Northeastern’s expensive meal plans. “I do [use Swipe2Care]! Really appreciate those who donate their meals, some weeks I just don't have the time or the money to cook and go grocery shopping” said one comment.

Weeks after its launch, the organizations that designed the program touted it as a success. In 2018, the SGA president at the time, Nathan Hostert, said in an interview with The News, “It has already worked, kids have already donated and received swipes, and we are only a couple of weeks in.”

Others were critical of Swipe2Care from the start, stating that even in the best scenario, when swipes transfer quickly, Northeastern is making students rely on other students instead of making the meal plans more affordable.

Graduate student Makaila Cerrone is a member of Northeastern Mutual Aid, a student organization that has organized a weekly food pantry and created a community fridge open to all. Cerrone has been a critic of Swipe2Care since its inception and continues to argue that the program must evolve into a no excuse, automatic process.

“[Swipe2Care] puts the onus on students, not on Northeastern. It is up to students, who, out of the goodness of their heart, have to remember to go in and donate their meal swipes, rather than it being automatic,” Cerrone said.

For Cerrone and several other students, Swipe2Care seems like a way for Northeastern to shift accountability from the university onto the students. At the end of the day, Northeastern gets away with only the appearance of fighting food insecurity. According to students, a more effective solution would allow students in need to access a pool of donated or unused swipes to use as needed.

“Northeastern gets to say ‘We’re not solving the problem. We’re not losing any money. It’s [the students] meals anyway, so you’ve already paid for them. You’re losing them anyway, so why don’t you donate them?’ So [Northeastern] isn’t taking responsibility,” Cerrone said. 

Like many of her peers, Cerrone believes that Northeastern must also change Swipe2Care to accommodate all Northeastern students, including her fellow graduate students. Graduate students face food insecurity at levels just as high, if not higher, than undergraduate students. According to a 2020 University of Albany study, 59.7% of graduate student respondents reported high or marginal levels of food insecurity.

As Swipe2Care is not offered for graduate students, Northeastern fails to provide a food insecurity lifeline for nearly 9,000 students.

In June 2020, Northeastern, a tax-exempt nonprofit university, garnered a staggering $240 million revenue surplus. For some, it is perplexing as to why the burden to help students falls onto other students while the university profits.

Northeastern’s chapter of the Young Democratic Socialists of America, or YDSA, sponsored a referendum in 2021 where 3,988 people, 86% of respondents, voted in favor of overhauling Northeastern’s meal plans. Sisman, the current chair of the club, believes that despite the referendum, the university continues to siphon off its students. 

“The food insecurity on campus is reprehensible,” said Sisman. “One fourth of the students on campus go food insecure at one point or another during their time at Northeastern.”

Northeastern’s $3,955 17-meal plan is one of the most expensive among Boston colleges all while providing less meals. The 12-meal plan, the cheapest required meal plan for first-years, costs $300 per month more than the average university dining plan. 

“The only reason Swipe2Care needs to exist is because [the meal plans] are unaffordable,” Sisman said. “An ideal Swipe2Care is no Swipe2Care.”

Along with reforming Swipe2Care, YDSA has called for Northeastern to lower its meal plan prices. The “No Hungry Huskies Campaign,” a YDSA effort to fight food insecurity, urges Northeastern to guarantee three meals a day for students who require meal plans and lower non-required meal plan prices by 24%, aligning Northeastern’s meal plan prices with others in Boston. The campaign has reached high levels of support, with the No Hungry Huskies petition reaching nearly 1800 signatures. 

However, there are successful stories of effective swipe sharing programs throughout college campuses. Swipe Out Hunger, a leading organization fighting college food insecurity, has worked with hundreds of universities around the country to implement swipe sharing and anti-hunger programs.

“Our ideal program is where students can donate as many swipes as they want and there is no barrier to another student accessing them. It’s just resource sharing,” said Swipe out Hunger Community Coordinator Heather Parrie. “Our ideal is that every student gets the meals they need, an unlimited model that if you're hungry you get a meal, no questions asked.” 

While food insecurity and its solution are not the same across all college campuses, swipe sharing, when implemented correctly, has been proven to work. Successful swipe sharing programs are often tailored to the students, where the programs allow the most students to access the most swipes. Swipe2Care fails to meet the needs of students now, but there is a possibility that changes to the program could effectively mitigate food insecurity at Northeastern in the future.

“It is not a one size fits all issue,” Parrie said. “We are encouraging administrators and faculty to take this on. What is food insecurity on Northeastern’s campus? What are the root causes? Who is most susceptible? And how do we have success?”

SGA is asking similar questions as how best to reform Swipe2Care to fit the needs of the student body. 

“I always saw Swipe2Care as a stop-gap measure,” said Charlie Zhang, a second year sociology and international business combined major and vice president of SGA student services. “It doesn’t combat the issue of food insecurity in the community.”

SGA is continuing to work with administrators to solve many of the issues students have raised. 

“We want to expand it to grad students, because they are a huge proportion of our student body that currently isn’t benefiting from this program at all,” Zhang said. “We also want to make it an automatic system … it should not be the job of the students to perform for those who are most in need, it really should be the administration.”

While SGA has held meetings with students and administrators in the past surrounding reforms to Swipe2Care, in the four years since the program's inception, nothing has changed. The seldom kept promises of change have left students like Gomez, Sisman and Cerrone asking Northeastern to stop talking, and actually act.

“I know there have been discussions about it since [Swipe2Care] has come out,” Cerrone said. “This is not a new conversation, so I think that if it has the potential to be great, let's stop talking about the changes and actually do it.”