Rachel Sumekh | Founder @ Swipe Out Hunger

I was 19 years old when a few friends and I walked out onto the streets of Los Angeles and handed out our first meal. Fast forward to today, and we've served 1.3 million meals. My name is Rachel Sumac. You can clap for that. Thank you. My name is Rachel Sumekh, and I'm the co-founder and CEO of a startup nonprofit called Swipe Out Hunger. And we allow college students to donate the extra money from their meal plan to hungry people in their community, particularly other college students. How many of you went to a public elementary, middle, or high school? All right, go public schools. I imagine that you also remember those huge cafeterias where you would go in, there's a long line, you're waiting, you're— picking up the things that you want, and as you approach the lunch lady, some students handed money, and some students handed, in LA, a little yellow lunch ticket. And in cities like New York, 70% of students are eligible for free lunch, so many that they just passed a law making just free lunch and breakfast for everyone. Great stuff. And in a city like Los Angeles, it's 50% of students. And I remember being a kindergartner as one of those students standing in the lunch line with my little yellow ticket clenched in my hand, ready to get my lunch. My parents were immigrants. They're Persian Jews, Iranian Jews, and they had just started to get their stride in Los Angeles. We're still hustling to make it happen. And I was very lucky that by the time I started 4th grade, they had made it. They were accomplishing the American dream, and we were living a pretty good life. But I think that the moment that they really thought that they had accomplished the American dream was when their daughter got accepted to UCLA. And UCLA— go Bruins— UCLA and most colleges don't have large cafeterias like public schools, but we do have amazing dining halls and meal plans. And for anyone who might remember buying that 10, 15, 20 meal a week plan and having extra money left over on your plan by the end of the week, which you didn't use, would roll over and roll over. And by the end of the semester, and maybe you guys can relate to this, you had hundreds of dollars left over. You weren't sure what to do with it. My friends and I found ourselves in the same predicament. We said that there must be something better that we can do with this. We decided to get a little table, set it up outside the dining hall, and ask our friends and ourselves to go inside and buy to-go boxes of food, bring it out to us, which we would then go and hand out to people on the street. We had this mountain of white Styrofoam boxes behind us by the end of the day. It was pretty incredible. And the first thing a UCLA administrator had to say to us was, "Get this the hell off campus." As you can imagine, they weren't the biggest fans of a bunch of college students walking into the dining hall, buying this food they didn't expect to have to prep, and having this flow of dozens of students going in and out. But rather than either disobey them or lay down, we thought that we had a valid claim here. So we decided to do a little bit of community organizing. We got campus administrators involved. We got a couple student body president— the student body president, student government involved. And after a couple months of negotiation, got them to agree to a new model. Now students were able to approach a table outside the dining hall at the end of the semester and say, I want to donate my 100 extra points. Those funds are taken from their account and used to help end hunger in the community. It was very exciting. Slowly, we started to get attention from other schools. USC down the street, UC Santa Barbara, and we began to grow. By 2013, we had received more attention than we could handle, more interest was coming in, and we decided we needed to hire someone full-time. And because this is a female empowerment— not a female empowerment, but like a female-focused event, it would be a shame if I didn't share at least one of the many daily microaggressions I have to face. and this one was actually something that helped shift us, push us forward. It was whenever I called one of my co-founders and I said, he's a couple years older than me, I said, hey, so I know we're trying to hire someone and, you know, what if I stepped into this role as CEO? And his response was, hmm, I hadn't really thought about that. You know, I think you're just too nice to be a leader. And I took it really personally, 'cause I saw myself as capable, and in my mind, being nice never conflicted with leadership. So what I did instead was get a mentor, put together a business plan, build a budget, put together a job description, move back to Los Angeles in September 2013, walk into a Starbucks, open my laptop, and start my first day as a full-time executive director of Swipe Out Hunger. A couple months— a couple months after that day, about a little less than a year, a year later, I remember sitting now in a cool coworking space looking across from an Excel sheet saying that we have collected hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars just by looking at meal plans. I'm thinking to myself, that's amazing. I know these dollars are probably doing something really good in the world, but I'm not sure like what, like where are they, what's going on? And I started to ask myself, what if we actually channeled these funds towards something specific, something measurable, something we knew would make a difference? And that's when the opportunity and almost the responsibility to tackle a specific segment of hunger became clear. And that was to focus on college student hunger. The same kindergarten to 12th grade student who hustled their way through school is now in college, still hungry, has debt, and the first thing you do once your budget is tight is to cut your food. And if you ask me, I don't think ramen noodles is enough to keep someone going, consistently and able to be successful in class. Swipe Out Hunger began to channel these funds from one student's meal plan onto another starting in 2012 to today, and now students are able to walk into the dining hall and have an amazing warm meal just like everyone else. But I'm not here to share our founding story with you. I'm actually here to share the story of a phone call I received in March of this year. It was a phone call from the legislative aide of a local assemblywoman. And she asked me, "You know, we've been thinking about the issue of college student hunger. It's pretty prevalent in California and across the country. 1 in 4 students at UCLA and UC Berkeley regularly skip meals because of lack of access to funds." And her office, this assemblywoman, wanted to take this on as her issue. She used to be a professor at UC Santa Barbara and saw how the impact of hunger, the impact hunger had on her students' academic performance. She asked me, "If we were to pass a law that would scale your program statewide, what would you want it to say?" And I literally started bawling and lifted my jaw off the floor and pitched an idea or two. And does everyone know what the state assembly is? This is California. Just like the federal government, there's a Senate and the House of Representatives. In California, we have a Senate and an assembly. So a couple weeks later, I get an email back from them with a proposal on official state letterhead, the watermark, with the words that I said being proposed as a bill for the state of California. Fortunately, there are amazing, amazing policy wonky people who helped make it actually effective and look nice. And then a few weeks later, I gave the most important pitch of my life, which was a 2-minute pitch to the Senate— to the Assembly Higher Ed Committee. In Sacramento, begging them, asking them, inspiring them to adopt this piece of legislation. And a couple weeks ago, we were— now months, in June— we were sitting in our office and we were keeping an eye on the bill. It made it past the assembly, was getting through the Senate, but before it made it through the Senate, Governor Brown plucked it up, put it into his budget, and what the bill said was any university, the 144 public community colleges, state schools, and UCs, if they implement this bill, which said if you have our program or a food pantry and also someone on campus who helps people sign up for CalFresh, or food stamps, then you'll be able to get some of this funding. And we had originally thought a campus would get a couple thousand dollars. Governor Brown created a $7.5 million fund based off of the program a couple of 20-somethings started, based off legislation a 25-year-old wrote, And now the state of California is finally taking seriously the impact that lacking basic needs has on its college students. And just as a reminder, a few years ago I was being told, "Get this the hell off my campus." And a few years after that I was being told, "I'm not capable of doing this, that I'm too nice." And after that I was told, "This is such a nice volunteer project, but when are you going to leave and go to law school?" You know, you went to a good school, you can do something real with your life. And as I think about what lessons or things I want to look back on and share, there's two that really come to mind. The first is that innovation does not come from an app that saves you 2 minutes in the morning, even though those are great and I use them. True innovation is whenever you reexamine the resources and systems around you and see them in new ways. And you ask, how do I make this better? How do I change this system or resource to help impact someone else's life? And those are things that we can take steps towards tomorrow. And the other thing I want to share is sometimes you have an idea and you're not sure if it's the right thing. The way to solve that is by just doing it and being open to feedback and responses and asking yourself, how do I make this better every single day? But continuing to be committed to it while also being open to what's possible. Because you never know, you might end up swiping out hunger. Thank you.