Author: Spenser Smith
To Oxy students who have been here for more than a year this may sound familiar: a group of students has approached the administration and campus dining in an attempt to allow excess meal plan money to be donated to a charitable cause. This time, however, a plan that takes into account administrative and economic realities offers hope of a workable compromise despite bureaucratic inertia that makes getting the project off the ground a daunting prospect.
The basic idea is very simple. Oxy students always have extra meal plan money at the end of the semester. While the majority of this money ends up unspent or as prodigious amounts of uneaten/wasted pop tarts, most students would like to see it put to a more productive use. In our liberal arts community, nothing seems to make more sense than to use this money to benefit those who are less fortunate.
Unfortunately the situation is more complex, and this is where actually implementing this simple-sounding proposal becomes tricky. Left-over meal plan money forms a vital part of Campus Dining’s revenue, which is accounted for in their fiscal projections at the beginning of every semester. Simply removing this source of funding would end up harming the Oxy community, either by leading to staff cuts in the Cooler and Marketplace or by spurring an increase in the cost of student meal plans.
It is this reality that has doomed previous attempts to donate meal money to charities. The challenge, then, is to come up with a scheme that lets students set aside some of their money for charity while ensuring that Campus Dining has the money it needs to continue serving Occidental College.
With this in mind, the current plan calls for Campus Dining to keep a percentage of student donations to cover administrative and labor costs. While some students would donate money that would otherwise have been kept by Campus Dining, other students would donate rather than indulging in end-of-the-year buying sprees, resulting in more net income for Campus Dining. With careful planning, organizers are hopeful that a mutually beneficial arrangement between Campus Dining and the student community is possible.
So how supportive is the Occidental student community? An informal poll conducted at lunch time in the quad and Marketplace asked 159 people at random if they would donate any excess meal plan money they had at the end of the semester to a charitable cause to help feed the hungry. 158 of those polled said they would, with about 5% of respondents stipulating that it would depend on the organization in question.
This near-universal support is a testament both to the desire of Oxy students to be a positive force in the world community and their conviction that small actions can lead to big differences. A quick look at the numbers supports such optimism.
For the sake of estimation, let us assume that 1,000 students at Oxy will end up with excess money on their meal plans (the real number is arguably higher). Of these 1,000, some will have a lot and some will not, so let’s call the average available to each person a modest $20 (again, a conservative estimate). This makes $20,000 available for donation, a percentage of which will be relegated to campus dining for overhead. Occidental College will therefore write a check (tax-deductible) for $10,000.
The $10,000 makes its way to some organization devoted to helping the hungry, for example the World Food Programme. This organization operates in troubled countries throughout the world with development and disaster relief programs, and is in constant need of donations of any size.
According to an audit of the WFP’s fiscal practices, 90% of that $10,000 would directly benefit needy individuals, such as the students of Zambia’s neediest schools for which the WFP offers free lunches every day. To put this in perspective, each lunch costs 12 cents. That means that the donations that made their way from Oxy across the ocean to grammar schools in Zambia will buy 75,000 meals.
To put it another way, student donations will fund the WFP operations for three Zambian schools for approximately a year. Not a bad trade for giving up a week of stale poptarts.There are other causes, of course. Food shortages from the genocide in Darfur and local charities that feed the impoverished and homeless in L.A. are two examples. No matter the cause, we have an opportunity to make a contribution
As it currently stands, this proposal is in danger of stalling in exactly the same way as all the attempts before it have. But that doesn’t mean it has to happen. Vocal student support will send a message to the administration that Oxy is committed to supporting this very worthy cause. The administration has shown that it is willing to discuss this issue, but it is up to students to take the initiative and finally make this happen. In the end, indifference is just as great an obstacle as complications and one that may be just as difficult to overcome.
Spenser Smith is a junior ECLS major. He can be reached at ssmith@oxy.edu
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