Host Kayla Hayempour talks with UCLA alum Rachel Sumekh, founder of Swipe Out Hunger, about turning a small campus initiative into a national movement against college food insecurity. Rachel shares her journey, the impact of student activism and how legislation she helped craft has secured over $100 million for campus hunger programs. Plus, UCLA’s Carl Maier joins to discuss Swipe Out Hunger’s work today.

Kayla Hayempour: Hello and welcome to Bruin to Bruin, the show where we sit down with members of the UCLA community to hear their story and advice they have for students. My name is Kayla Hayempour, and I’m a podcast contributor at the Daily Bruin. Today, I’ll be interviewing alum Rachel Sumekh, an entrepreneur and strategy consultant. Rachel’s clients include startups, nonprofits and philanthropies. She learned how to make change happen as the founder of Swipe Out Hunger, where she was CEO until 2022.

Swipe Out Hunger began in 2009 with a few friends at UCLA and its network has since scaled to 900 universities serving millions of nourishing meals. The organization is the leading nonprofit ending college student hunger and collaborates with colleges, legislators and the greater community to address student food insecurity. In 2017, Rachel wrote The Hunger Free Campus Act, which has been introduced in 22 states, sending over $100 million plus dollars to anti-hunger programs on campus. Rachel’s work has been recognized by the Obama White House and landed her on the Forbes 30 under 30 list. She continues her advocacy for students as a board member at the Los Angeles Community College Foundation. Rachel credits her Iranian Jewish parents for her intersectional perspective and warm leadership style.

In 2019, I was matched with Rachel for mentorship through the Los Angeles Jewish Federation’s Teen Innovation Grant Program, where I was working on my own advocacy project. Six years after being mentored by Rachel, I’m excited to be speaking with her today. Rachel, thank you for coming on and welcome to the show.

Rachel Sumekh: Kayla, I’m so excited to be in conversation with you.

KH: I want to start from the very beginning. I know your Iranian Jewish heritage is really important to you. What did that mean growing up? How do you think that shaped you and your value system?

RS: If I can actually take it a step back – so as you mentioned, both my parents are Iranian Jews who came to the U.S. and really never expected to, right? For 3,000 years, Jews had lived in Iran. This was where we had our own food, had our own language, had our own culture, and coming here, my parents really instilled in us a sense of community and connection and groundedness, an attempt to almost rebuild what we lost back home. So I grew up in a very tight knit, welcoming, warm, just the kind of community you want to be raised in.

And when I came to UCLA, I think I started to realize a lot more of, one – I did not know what people think about Jewish community. They think of Jewish summer camp and bagels and lox. Those are two things I’d literally never heard of in my life until I got to campus. But really, for me, my identity is just a sense of groundedness, like we have been through so much. We have rebuilt and we are still joyful and comedic and welcoming, and so I really hold on to those values. And instead of just keeping that to our own sense of selves, I open that to everyone, like the table that I sit at, in my mind, is welcoming for everyone.

KH: Absolutely, I love that. I think definitely some things that resonate with me are resilience and openness. Judaism has this value of tikkun olam, helping to repair the world, and so I think those values have definitely also shaped me and also coming to UCLA. I’ll transition into your experience there, we know it now as the Persian center of Los Angeles. Was it always like that for you? Did you feel very at home coming to campus? Or, was it a little bit of a culture shock, not just with the you know, I do think a lot of what people think is Ashkenazi Judaism. When people found out I’d never tried matzah ball soup before, it was like the world was ending. So I relate to you, but in terms of just general campus climate, what was that transition like for you?

RS: One of the best things I did at UCLA was take Farsi, I think like Farsi for native speakers, which was with Khanoom Hagigi and now with Dr. Sahba. And it is the most LA thing ever that there is a class at the public university for people who grew up speaking. So many of us grew up speaking Farsi, but not knowing the grammar, how to read and write, that there’s a whole class, and it was packed. So I think that class was the embodiment of campus life for me, one because it was a place unlike many other places on campus where Iranian students, whether you’re Jewish or Baha’i or Muslim or agnostic or not even Persian or religious, you’re in a space together, and you’re able to connect. I know there’s always really wonderful relationships I made in that class. And we went to Persian restaurants together. So I think if there’s anything that captures the Persian experience, it’s walking into that classroom on any given day and seeing all these first-gen Iranian students and maybe even second-gen now, understanding what our culture means in the modern context.

There was also a class for many years by Dr. Sahba, another Saba Soomkeh, who, actually, it’s no longer there, but Dr. Soomekh, of no relation, unfortunately, led a class on the history of Iranian Jews in LA for many years. And it was so cool to kind of have a sense of like, okay, this is history of the past 30, 40, years, but you’re still making that history as a student here.

KH: Definitely, and something that I feel also is just the way that so many other students on campus that maybe have no connection to Persian culture are so welcoming or excited to learn more about it. For a lot of people in my life, I am the first Persian person they’ve ever met. And so when I find out that they go and get faloodeh at Saffron and Rose, I’m just like, “Oh my gosh, wow, that’s your favorite flavor.” So it’s exciting to be in a community that is so supportive of the fact that there are so many different students with so many different types of upbringings, and yet there’s a warmth and an acceptance and a joy when it comes to sharing parts of those cultures with people around you. And Westwood with the food, is the perfect place to do that, for sure.

RS: I mean, how lucky are we to have food that is so good, that makes it so easy to invite people in through. My husband is American, and he just, I mean, was in love with Persian food before we even met. So it’s a really wonderful asset that we’ve got.

KH: Absolutely I think food is a bridge to humanity in a lot of ways, and that’s actually the perfect segue into talking about Swipe Out Hunger. What was the motive or the thing that really drove you to start fighting the hunger crisis? Was there a particular experience that really changed the game for you?

RS: I know you’re sharing about this in the intro, but for those of you who don’t know, Swipe Out Hunger is now a national organization that started at UCLA, and our entire mission is making sure that food is not the reason why someone doesn’t graduate or doesn’t do well on a test. So we help partner with over 900 campuses and managing their pantries, but also in making sure that if they have a dining hall, and there’s a student who has 19P and those meal swipes are going to expire, that they have a chance to donate it to their peers. Their peers can access warm, nourishing meals in their dining hall. We also do a lot of policy and legislative work that I’d love to get into.

But honestly, the turning point for me, as I shared, I grew up in a very insular community. I grew up in the valley. Shout out to the 818. And my friends and I, when we first started Swipe, my friend Bryan Pezeshki, he organized the first swipe drive. And I remember we had collected like 1,000 swipes, and we weren’t at the point – this is Swipe 1.0 – we didn’t have our meal swipe donation program yet, where you can donate the credits electronically to another student. It was literally pallets of food. So ORL and dining would order pallets of food that we then took to the food pantry in CPO, in the Student Activity Center. We were going to just move these pallets of food, but there were so many pallets, and me and Bryan were the only ones basically there and I said, “Okay, Bryan, we have to reschedule this. There’s like 15 pallets, and it’s just you and me. It’s a hot June day, and the only tool we have to move this is a move-in cart, which is going to take us forever.”

And he said, “No, we told the university that we were going to do something important with this food, that people needed it, which is why they agreed to the program. So we have to do this today.” And we spent the next five, six hours on a hot June day, moving this food up and down campus. And for me, it was a turning point in the sense that you realize that if you want to do something that’s never been done before, it’s going to be uncomfortable. You’re not going to be clear on what the path is, but you have to do it. Similarly, when we started Swipe, even before that version, we were collecting boxes of food and Styrofoam boxes that students would bring out to our tables. And one day, one of the dining directors came over, slammed one of the boxes of food and said, “You’re not allowed to do this on my campus.” And I’m dramatizing it a little bit, because that was our experience as students. We’re like, “We’re trying to feed people. How dare you even tell us to stop?”

But it was a wake up call in the sense that I literally had never offended a single person until the age of 18, when I was at UCLA and was confronted with someone telling me I shouldn’t do something that was good for the world. These are our meal swipes. We’re trying to feed people. How is this not the right thing to do?

And I suddenly became, with me and my friends, committed to changing the policy to make sure that anyone who wanted to do something like donate their meal swipes had the chance to.

KH: Wow. Well, not only is that really profound, but I think it’s something that a lot of students on UCLA campus can relate to. Can you go more into what the mental toll was for you and how you overcame that? Because I have to imagine that maybe there were two sides. You were passionate and you wanted to keep going, but also there was maybe some doubt about whether you were going to actually be able to accomplish what it is that you’ve set out to do. How did you navigate that process?

RS: You know, Kayla, I was so worried that I would be out of touch. But for you to say, nope, that’s still a problem, we’re still experiencing, that makes me feel very comforted. Unfortunately.

We knew what we were up against, which is a very large university that has so many cogs and wheels that for us to make them change would take a lot. So we gathered really influential friends that we had. One person was in a fellowship and the person who ran the fellowship was super influential, great. Bring them on our team. Oh, we got this recognition, let’s make sure the school sees that. And we tried to amass as much power as possible, and also approach with proposals, come to meetings dressed nicely. We try to play by the rules, while leveraging as much power from the outside as we could so we weren’t just seen as students, we were seen as this validated initiative that needed to happen.

KH: So transitioning into how Swipe grew, it started at UCLA. You’re now on 900 campuses. How did that change occur? How did you grow to that level?

RS: I’m really excited for Carl, who’s I think the IVP of Swipe at UCLA right now, to join our call – our podcast – in a few minutes, so he can really share all the amazing progress they’ve made to date.

Our experience, I’ll be honest with you, when we started, there was no goal of going beyond UCLA, it was like, we just want this program here. And then our friends at USC are like, how did you make this happen? Our friends at UC Santa Barbara, at UC San Diego. It was really, literally at the time, posting on Facebook, which is how people found out what we were doing at UCLA, and friends reaching out and saying, “How do we do this?” Interestingly enough, all those early founders were also all Persian, because they were my friends, and we just started to kind of teach them. There was a huge change moment in 2012 when President Barack Obama invited us to the White House. Which is an insane thing to say, but he was a wonderful administration, did a lot of great things, including inviting smart, passionate college students to the White House. That was in 2012. We got a lot of national recognition and within a week, we had over 30 campuses across the U.S., students saying, “How do I do this? How do I do this?” So that was like 12 years ago. And a lot of our growth in that time came when I stepped in actually full time to run Swipe Out Hunger as a nonprofit.

I was our first full-time staff member, and I came in in 2013 and said, “I’m going to build an organization. I’m going to figure out how to fundraise. I’m going to figure out how to have a board of directors and build programs to teach other students how to run this.” The organization today, as I shared, has grown from just me to a team of 13 full-time people. I actually have stepped away as CEO. We have a brand new, amazing CEO, and it’s really become a force to be reckoned with. When we started, people were not acknowledging that college students are hungry. Nationally, one in three college students are food insecure. People were saying – by people, I mean, universities – were saying, “It’s not my job. Okay, fine, they’re hungry. It’s not my job.” Until we came in and said, “Not only is it your job, but it’s actually to your own benefit if your students can thrive and get that degree in four years.” So the national landscape, our movement changed the conversation in the national landscape thanks to a lot of really good data that came out that really showed that students are going hungry and that interventions like meal swipes, like food pantries, like full-time social workers and case managers and all the supportive services that are offered on campus make a really big difference in students lives.

KH: I have chills. I want to come back to all of that, because I don’t think you can just gloss over the fact that you were invited to the White House by the Obama administration. But I’m going to put that on pause for one second, because we actually have a student who is helping lead Swipe Out Hunger currently on UCLA campus. Carl, welcome to the episode. Please feel free to introduce yourself and your role within the organization right now.

Carl Maier: Hi, Hello, thanks for having me on. My name is Carl Maier. I’m the current internal vice president for Swipe Out Hunger at UCLA, but yeah, I’m really excited to be here and talk about Swipe Out Hunger. Great to meet y’all.

KH: Well, thank you for coming on. We were just speaking about how Swipe Out Hunger has really grown to this large national organization that is now on hundreds of college campuses to help fight the hunger crisis. Can you give us a little bit more context as to what is happening on UCLA’s campus currently, and also how students can be involved if they’re either interested in donating or want to receive meals.

CM: Yeah, absolutely. So right now, there’s still a lot of work to be done, obviously, all over the country and here at UCLA, that’s still true. So according to the UC Basic Needs Report, 35% of undergraduates and 35% of graduate students are still food insecure. So there’s a lot of work to be done there. And we’ve really grown. We’ve really grown over the past 15 years. We still have our main, our flagship program. It’s still our swipes drive. Right now we’re running our quarterly fall swipes drive. Right now we’re distributing flyers. We have all our tables reserved and everything in front of the dining halls. We’re going to be yelling at people, “Donate your swipes, donate your swipes!” The whole, the whole song and dance. So we still have that. That’s our main program.

We’ve run it every typically, actually, in the past couple years, we’ve only been able to have it open during week 10. Like we have a whole form, QR code. Students scan it, they sign it up, “Yeah, I want to donate my swipes after the quarter ends.” And that form’s only been available week 10, when we’re actually tabling. But as of this quarter, we’re actually able to get it open by week five. You know, every year we’re trying to change stuff and improve stuff, and you know, if we get it open earlier, we’re hoping to get more responses, more donations. So that’s our main program. We also have expanded. We have a bunch of committees now. We have a designated swipes drive committee, which everyone, everyone helps with, everyone in the club can help with any committee. We still have people assigned to specific committees, so then they can focus on that.

So we have the swipes drive committee. We have our Glean committee, which goes to a direct, it’s a direct service program. And they go to the Brentwood and Westwood farmers market, and they have relationship, we have relationships with some of the vendors there, where they’ll give us some of the leftover produce, that they they don’t want to sell that’s left over by the end, and we’ll donate that to grad student housing. There’s a, like a distribution center right off campus, 580 Cafe. They’ll prepare meals. They’ll give out food. We donate to them, too, through your leading program.

RS: Shout out to Cafe 580. What, what they’re doing is leading the way. Before anyone was talking about college youth and hunger, Cafe 580 was really where students went. That’s awesome.

CM: We love Cafe 580. They do amazing work. They do a lot too, like, they really put in a lot of work.

So we have that. We have PATH where we go to a local shelter, and we’ll make meals, meals for the unhoused people there. That’s another one of our big direct service programs. We have an education committee to do presentations within our org, and then the other orgs too, and try to kind of get all of the basic needs organizations on campus on the same page. We have an advocacy committee where they look at different policies. We have a lot of big programs going on with that right now.

RS: Can I share a fun fact? You know the Bruin Dine program right? Basically, from what I understand, you can just, they center all the food that’s left over from the dining halls into one dining hall. You go in, you bring your Tupperware, and you get as much food as you can, as you need to take back home with you, right? That started as a swipe out hunger program. What I love about Swipe we, to Carl’s point, everything you described are things that students like, I want to bring this in. I want to go to PATH, I want to Glean. Those things were not there when we were running Swipe right. It really is just like an OG group on campus where ideas can kind of pop off and students can really get involved. It’s so cool to hear about all y’all are doing.

CM: Yeah, yeah. We love, we love Bruin Dine. We work with them all the time. We have SFS, Sandwiches For Smiles. We’ll go, we make sandwiches in front of the Bruin Bear. Those sandwiches – it’s really just to kind of raise awareness about food insecurity. And those sandwiches get made right in Bruin Plaza. They get donated to Grace Lutheran Church. And then also, students are allowed to also make a sandwich for themselves, too, to take it to class. So we have a lot, like Rachel said, we have a lot of programs, and we really try to be innovative with what we’re doing. And we didn’t even have a swipes drive committee until this year. It was really just like the whole org was working on it. But we’re up to 50 members off the top of my head, so it’s hard to coordinate 50 people working together on, like, just trying to reserve, trying to, like, advertise for swipes drive. So we really felt the need to, like, make a specific committee for it. So we’re still – stuff is still changing. We’re still trying to improve.

RS: And if people want to get involved, like, you guys have an awesome UCLA Swipe Out Hunger Instagram page. So follow them on IG @UCLAswipeouthunger. And obviously, if you’ve not been yelled at during week 10 on the Hill, have you ever even gone to a dining hall, right? It’s like an essential part of the experience, right?

KH: It’s a right of passage to be heckled by somebody trying to get you to sign up for something or donate to something. But you know, it, it’s important, and there are two things that I want to say. First of all, I think the entire basis of Swipe Out Hunger shows that students mobilizing together, even if it’s just one person, even if it just starts out with your friends, is a really powerful force to raise awareness for something that you’re interested in, and to make a difference in that.

Rachel, you were talking about earlier, nobody was talking about the hunger crisis or food insecurity among college students. I think also there’s sometimes only an emphasis on undergraduates. And so here’s a program that has grown so much, where you could be a grad student and still receive these resources. And the other thing that I want to mention going off of that is, I feel like sometimes when it comes to needing to take advantage of these resources, there can be a little bit of a stigma where people maybe feel embarrassed about the fact that they need to take advantage of these resources. These are there for you, and there is nothing wrong with needing to come to Bruin Dine and get the leftover food, to get swipes donated to you. That’s why these resources exist. And Carl, maybe you can speak more to the culture of the organization, in general, that these are people who care, who’ve maybe experienced this themselves, and want to help people out of not pity, not anything that people should be ashamed of, but because this is a crisis that needs to be solved for all of college students across the entire country.

CM: Yeah, everything you just said, that’s all stuff we emphasize, we talk about. You know, one of our, one of the things we love, a saying that gets passed down is food is a right, not a privilege. You know, no one, no one asked for help that doesn’t need help. If people need these resources, they are free to ask for it, and we encourage them to ask for it. They’re here for a reason. They’re here to support people. And that’s really just, that’s, that’s something that we really, really believe in,

KH: Absolutely, that everybody deserves the right to the food that they need to nourish themselves.

RS: Yeah, and I think a reason why I love Swipe Out Hunger, obviously, I mean, I’m a big fan of Swipe, is that a big reason why people are able to get past the stigma and ask for help is that it’s not some corporate government office they’re going to. It’s their friends. It’s people in their class with them who are talking about it, who are saying, “Come make a sandwich, take a sandwich home. Come stop by.” It decreases stigma so much. And our studies, you know, always show that students, when you ask them, “How did you hear about resources?” despite all the flyering and all the emails, students really learn about services when it’s through resources they trust. And nothing is better than friends. So having Swipe be a core part, obviously, since 2009/10 when we got started, UCLA has really stepped up, right? We have a new food pantry. We have full-time staff. We have so many incredible resources that ECRT and so many other departments have invested in. And, it is critical that the student voice in Swipe Out Hunger, in Bruin Dine, in the CalFresh programming, in every group on campus that’s making food and basic things accessible, stay there, for the programming to be relevant, for the programming to be updated, for to be cool, for it to be used. So I’m so happy to hear you’ve got 50 members. That’s awesome.

CM: And a lot of them, a lot of them are involved in some of those other organizations too. Like we have, we have some members where they’ll, they’re working for CPO, and like, working with their food pantry. We have some that are in CalFresh, some that are in Bruin Dine. So there’s really within the basic needs community at UCLA, there’s a lot of interconnectedness. All the basic needs, or at least most of the basic needs organizations, are all in the Basic Needs Coalition. And we have meetings for that. There’s a student coalition for basic needs. So there’s a lot of interconnectedness and reliance between the organizations on campus.

RS: And I also just want to say I know this is like the alumni podcast, that being off campus, being in the world and being able to say that all of this started at UCLA adds so much weight and so much cache, and I think is a big reason why Swipe Out Hunger was as successful as it was. Because people were like “Oh, that’s a place with smart, cool people in a smart, cool city. Great. Let’s listen to what you’ve got to say.”

KH: Absolutely and what I want to ask about, speaking of not just the change that was generated on UCLA’s campus, but also the change that was generated in California and also nationally. I want to talk about the Hunger Free Campus bill. Can you shed some light onto what that is, how you started that and just the way that that has taken the nation by storm since its inception?

RS: I mean, it has been – okay, I’ll tell you the story of, in 2017 getting an email from a woman that had just been elected to the California State Assembly, Monique Limón, and her and her office, saying, “Hey, Monique was an administrator at Santa Barbara Community College, and she saw how your programs help support their students at UCSB, at SBCC. Can you write a piece of legislation that would take Swipe Out Hunger onto every college in California?” Just imagine, I was 24 getting an email like that. Immediately I started drafting a bill that is not just about Swipe Out Hunger. It’s about food pantries. It’s about full-time staff. It’s about having infrastructure on the campus.

And I send it over to them, and we start to build a coalition with the UC system, CSUs, getting every system on board. And a few months later it passes, which is insane, and $7.5 million is immediately put into the budget to go to our three systems, community colleges, CSUs, UCs, to help support their basic needs services. The next year, that bill is passed again at $30 million. The following year, $100 million, and it’s just continued to remain as a support to our best state ever: California’s colleges.

And what happened a year or two in, New Jersey reached out. They’re like, “How do we get this in New Jersey?” Then Minnesota, then Pennsylvania, then Massachusetts and then people didn’t even reach out to us. They were just like, “Oh, this is just a bill that exists, we’re just going to start replicating it.” We had to then reach out to them and be like, “Let us help you.” Oklahoma, Louisiana. I’m telling you, red, blue, purple. Every state was just like, “How do we show up for students?” So now it’s, you know, there’s a lot of bills that are introduced that you’re sometimes worried about. That these are, oh my god, bad bills are popping up all across the country. This was an instance of a good bill popping up all across the country. And to date, it’s been passed in nine states. It’s been introduced in 22. And you can go to swipehunger.org/hungerfree to learn all about it.

But it’s one of those things that you kind of can’t plan, but you have to be prepared for. When we passed Hunger Free Campus in California in 2017, that month, the Swipe Out Hunger nonprofit literally had no money in its bank account. I’m like, “How am I passing a bill, but I’m unable to raise enough money to keep going?” And so for me, it was like a kick in the butt of like, this deserves to be a really big, important, well funded nonprofit. Like, we got to go raise dollars. We got to build something that lasts.

KH: It really did become a movement. And I also can just think of the feeling of seeing something that started off as small as just trying to get food to people on your college campus, to then having other states reach out to you and ask to implement that bill. It grew to something so much bigger that, like you said, you never even imagined, which I think is the beauty of starting small. There are so many endless possibilities for where it could go. And speaking of where it could go, Carl, are there any initiatives that you guys are working on currently? I know you had mentioned you have a policy section of the organization right now. Is there anything in the works in terms of continuing that momentum for legislation?

CM: Yeah, absolutely. Our biggest, our biggest initiative that we’re working on right now, that’s a very long-term project. We’re working on a CalFresh equivalent for undocumented students, in light of the UC’s decision and the legislation – legislated decision and the governor’s office decision that prevents undocumented students from being able to work on UC campuses. You know that is typically a population that is more adversely affected by food insecurity. So we really think we need to be able to support them. So right now, our big project is that CalFresh equivalent for them. We’re still in the early stages. We’re trying to replicate a program that is at UC Santa Barbara and at UC Davis, where they already have it. I believe UC Santa Barbara is like $100 a quarter in two installments, which is not, you know, that’s not as much as like, as like an EBT card, but it’s something that can still help. So we’re working the – our main project is to try and get that going right now. We’re reaching out to the undocumented student center, to UCLA admin. We’re working with USAC on it. Yeah, it’s a lot, lot of branching out right now, a lot of preliminary stuff, but that’s our biggest project, at least specifically within like the swipes drive program too.

We’re trying to work with ResLife – UCLA ResLife – UCLA dining, to try and get it so that students that have our regular meal plan, which, it resets every week. What our end goal is to try and allow students to be able to donate every week, rather than just at the end of the quarter. Because right now, this, the way the swipes drive is set up, is really only accessible to students with premium plans, where it’s like they get all the swipes for the whole quarter all at once, and then the, the swipes that are, that students on the R plan have, they just they still go to waste at the end of every week. So those are our main two pushes right now.

KH: That is fantastic. Thank you so much for joining us. Is there anything else that you want to share to people listening? I know we said follow the Instagram, but that is a great place to find the resources on UCLA college campus, and to also check out the website, because that’s a resource for people all across the nation if they’re interested in starting something or passing a bill in their state, or just getting involved in the area near them. But if there’s anything else that you think is notable to mention to our listeners, please do mention it.

CM: Yes, first and foremost, if you are on the Hill and you have a meal plan, please sign up to donate for the fall swipes drive. There will be some in the future too, during winter and spring. Please, please, please sign up to donate. Those swipes just go to waste and they go back to dining if you do not donate, and they’re only taken out of students’ accounts after all the dining halls are closed, so it’s the swipes that wouldn’t be used anyways. So please, please, please, sign up to donate. You can find that on our Instagram. We have a bunch of posts up there. We have in our link in our bio that takes you to the donation form, but yeah, and thank you all for your time. Thank you, Rachel, you do amazing work for student food insecurity, and we’re really proud to have you as the founder of our chapter.

RS: Carl, it is so cool to be in this alternate universe, parallel time zone, where we both exist at the same time, living very similar lives once, and honestly, just so inspired by what you and the team have done this year and in the years to come.

CM: Thank you. Thank you also for your time. Have a good one.

KH: Thank you. And I want to ask you, Rachel, it is crazy that you and Carl, the continuity of this organization. We’re seeing it right now as we’re recording this episode. What are some of the values or the lessons that you learned when you were developing or working with Swipe that you still carry with you now, even though you’re no longer CEO of the organization?

RS: Oh man, so much. I’ve never been asked that question, and I love it. This has been such an awesome interview. You’re an amazing interviewer, Kayla, and so glad we could reconnect here.

A few things. One is we were such a diverse group. We started because one person, one of our early founders, was Gen Rep three, and then my friend Bryan, and then a bunch of like this, just these different groups that came together, and there was so much strength in that diversity that we all had very different ways that we partied on Thursday nights. We had very different friends we hung out with, but we all came together, and it made us so much stronger because people had different relationships and different perspectives. So since then, I have a very diverse group of friends, very diverse teams I work with, because it just makes everything way more effective and way more efficient, even when it’s hard. You don’t all have to agree.

I learned very early on – this is the second lesson I’ll share – is that if you don’t work with someone simply because you don’t vibe together, you’re not going to make a lot of success. Did we vibe with ORL and Housing? No, but we showed up. Do we vibe with the companies that we partner with now to serve 10s of thousands of meals? No, they’re massive, Fortune 500 companies that don’t take care of their workers well enough. But when we partner with them, we leverage their infrastructure to impact thousands of lives. So just because you don’t vibe with someone, if you have a way to make an impact with them, at least for myself, I’m always going to find a way to improve lives through partnerships that I put my ego aside and my pride aside and center the mission and the work.

And the last lesson is, I mentioned partying on Thursday nights. We have a tradition at Swipe called the S-party, where everyone would, because we’re Swipe, everyone would dress up as something like an S. I dressed up as a stop sign one year – like people dress up – and Snooki from Jersey Shore. This is like a big throwback, but we have S-parties, and we all really learn the value of being social together. So to this day, anytime I’m hosting or working with people, making sure that we’re also connecting as humans is so essential. It was like the most transformative experience of my life, getting to go from a student to then graduating, I did a year of service with AmeriCorps in between, and realized Swipe is where my heart is, and came in as our first full-time staff member.

And those you know, 10 years running the organization were the most transformative, impactful I’ve ever had and finding my footing in the nonprofit space was not what I thought it would be. I thought I would just, you know, become a case manager or work in programs. But even the work I do now, I’m a consultant and advisor for a lot of different initiatives.

It’s not so much about where you are. You can be working in a for-profit, you can work in government. You can work in a nonprofit. You can be a student. It’s really about just finding a place where they need someone smart, they need someone who has your skill set to come in and connect dots and bring something to life.

KH: I think something that is really hitting me, just as you’ve spoken this entire call, is this was a project that was fulfilling for you, and it was addressing a need, but it was also something that you enjoyed so much so that you were called back to be the first full-time worker. And that is something that I think is really important, because I know I’ve heard from a lot of my peers that people are deterred from maybe working in a nonprofit sector because, “Oh, I’m not going to make enough money” or “You’re going to be fighting so long for something that you’re never going to see in your lifetime,” but there’s so much power and joy in doing the small things and making the changes that do feel meaningful to you, even if it was just one student can get a meal. And then look where just starting with that ended up right, like sticking with it and just finding what it is that you’re passionate about and not letting other forces or other people deter you, I think is a really, really powerful thing.

RS: You said it, perseverance is everything right? I could have stopped at so many points, but it was staying consistent in the conversation that brought us to where we are today.

KH: Definitely. So you mentioned doing impact consulting. What are some cool projects that you’re working on? Is there anything that you’re excited about as you look towards the future, away from Swipe a little bit more?

RS: I still think about Swipe all the time. I read every food policy newsletter that comes my way. I still am in regular conversation with our CEO, Jaime, and the whole team.

It is like the best teaching ground I ever had. I’m excited about a few other projects. I’m working with a group of foundations on really making sure that people that are low income are not left behind. The world is so crazy right now, but we need to keep funding, especially not knowing what future federal budgets look like. Actually, we do know. There’s going to be huge cuts. I’m not a fortune teller, but there’s going to be big cuts coming, and that’s going to impact a lot of low-income people. So a lot of my energy is spent right now making sure that philanthropists know where to invest to support the most vulnerable in the next few years.

And, yeah, I mean, we talked about being Jewish, I’m very focused on building a community where everyone is welcome and everyone feels seen and heard. And it’s like it feels very political to be a Jew right now, like I just want to be Jewish, and it feels very charged and political, like you need to have the right answers for things. And it’s hard to talk about. I can’t believe I’m even naming that it’s hard to talk about right? Like, I’ve been on my own journey of just understanding how to depolarize things, and I think coming together around issues like supporting the most vulnerable, supporting people who are food insecure, is a way that we can really build bridges.

KH: Absolutely. I think finding the common ground with people around you who may be different from you, is a skill that will help you in so many different aspects of your life and in your future. And going back to the point you made about not vibing with people, I relate to that so hard, because when I was working in the menstrual equity field, nobody wanted to talk with a 15-year-old girl who would just mention periods every other sentence. And so being able to see things from other people’s perspective and find common ground and find shared humanity in the things that separate you and make you different is really something that I think is valuable in a world that can feel very divisive right now. So that is a great lesson to kind of take, take with you, and also something that I think a lot of people are continuously working on right now, given everything happening in the world.

RS: Yeah, I think that, like not everyone has the capacity to do what you just described, which is be able to listen. People are really proximate to the violence and proximate to challenging situations. And you know, we respect that. You know you don’t need to be the build – bridge builder. You can take care of yourself and your community and those who can maintain the relationships and connections for the larger work to do together. It’s important that we do that.

KH: Absolutely. I think that we were, before we started recording this episode, we were chatting briefly about self care and so I think maybe to close this out, what is something that you are going to try to do for yourself, maybe in the next coming days? I feel like I have a stack of sheet masks that I need to get through, so maybe my self care will be doing a face mask a little bit later. But is there anything that you plan on?

RS: Totally. I feel like the hardest part of this is just sitting still for 10 minutes and not eating or drinking anything. Yeah, a few things. One is I go on a lot of walks and Saturdays I’m able to go on really long, like an hour, hour and a half, long walk. So going on a long walk, drinking some water and what else. I’m seeing my cousins on Sunday night. I’m so excited to just spend quality downtime with people. And we talked about how everything on campus feels so magnified, like every project, every fight, every everything feels so magnified. I remember being in that. When in reality, it’s not, it’s going to be okay. There’s a much larger sea that we don’t see when you’re on a campus, that we’re a part of, and so I feel grateful to keep that lesson with me. Remind me, even now, when I get caught up in my work, it’s gonna be okay, there’ll be another week, and these projects will get done.

KH: Definitely, the world will still turn. And I think sometimes as young people, you do feel a lot of pressure, whether from the people around you, or self imposed, that you have to be the fixer, the doer, because this is our future. And it’s okay to take a step back and just realize that everybody has to do what they have the bandwidth for. And yeah, you’re not going to be able to solve everything. I think something that I really thought about when I was doing the menstrual equity work was you don’t have to change the whole world, you just have to change your corner of it. And that is something that I still really keep with me, because, you know, it’s important to have perspective and take a step back and be proud of also the work that you’ve accomplished and be proud of the fact that you were invited to speak with the Obama administration. That’s something crazy, you know, something that you can, you can keep as your back pocket party fun fact for a while.

RS: Definitely. And I think that’s like, a great note to just leave folks as well. In this moment where trying to pass anything federally feels overwhelming and hard, that helps feed people at least, there’s the reminder that even if there’s one or two people that you can support, that’s really what it comes down to. Going away from scale and leaning into relationships and leaning into your proximate community, whatever that looks like for you. Even if that means finding people like that in a community is self care in and of itself. You don’t need to solve the whole thing. You can just focus on one or two people.

KH: Absolutely. Well, with that wonderful advice, we will close out. Rachel, thank you so much for joining me. This was such a pleasure, and it was so great to see you again and also just chat about everything that you’ve done and are up to. So thank you again.

RS: Thank you so much Kayla. It was awesome to reconnect and excited to watch all the other podcasts that you have come out.

KH: Oh, thank you. Take care.

Bruin to Bruin is brought to you by Daily Bruin podcasts. You can listen to this show and all Daily Bruin podcasts on Spotify and Apple podcasts, and the audio and transcript is available at Dailybruin.com I’m Kayla Hayempour, thanks for listening.