More than Pennies holds food-donation event, but is frustrated by Penn Dining

Penn students are becoming famous for not eating - or rather, for donating their uneaten meals to the homeless.

Since reading days last semester, Wharton freshman Ricky Oxenhandler, along with College freshmen Becca Elman and Jake Werlin, a Daily Pennsylvanian photographer, has been working on More Than Pennies, an initiative to donate students' uneaten meals to homeless people and shelters around Philadelphia.

What started out as a few students hand-delivering meals to homeless people in and around SEPTA stations has quickly grown into a University-wide initiative assisted by the Undergraduate Assembly and Penn Dining Services. The project is also being featured by NBC.

After overcoming a few hurdles with Penn Dining, the group last Wednesday held a large-scale end-of-semester event allowing students to pledge meals they wished to donate.

The project first involved students individually collecting non-perishable items in take-out cartons from campus dining halls and delivering them to Philadelphia SEPTA stations and homeless shelters.

As the initiative grew, Oxenhandler, Elman and Werlin worked to get more students interested and involved by collaborating with the UA.

College Sophomore and chairman of the UA's Civic and Community Engagement Committee Mark Pan said the UA's primary goal in this initiative is fostering communication and collaboration among all student groups that hope to put leftover meals from Dining Services to use.

While More than Pennies originally planned to continue collecting individual take-out cartons for three days last week, Dining Services protested the plan. Oxenhandler explained that they were worried that they would not have enough food left in the dining hall to last each day.

"On a regular night, they plan it out so accordingly that they only have two apples left and three bananas," he said.

This would make the cap for number of meals taken out the amount of food that was available, rather than the number of meals students wanted to donate.Dining Services also accounts for unused meals as a part of their business plan, said Elman.

As as result, Dining Services proposed having students sign pledges on one day declaring their donations. It would then provide food in bulk of an equivalent monetary value to the amount students donated.

Dining Services did not respond to requests for comment. Oxenhandler noted that it first responded to their requests for collaboration after NBC requested to cover the project.

Elman said although the pledges allowed a space for students to state the maximum amount of meals they would be willing to donate, Dining Services guaranteed only one meal per student.

The new plan is mutually beneficial by allowing Dining Services to remain fully operational, Oxenhandler said. Bulk items will last longer and can be catered to the different shelters' individual needs. Also, it makes the logistics of food transportation slightly easier because students do not have to transport thousands of individual take-out cartons.

However, from the total amount that Dining Services said they spent according to pledges received, they have only allocated $3.61 per meal, assuming they only accounted for one meal for the 532 donors, said Elman.

Averaging lunch and dinner, the price for a meal between lunch and dinner is $12.95, so even taking cost of labor and other related fees into account, "we still think $3.61 is a little weak," she said.

Additionally, if Dining Services had accounted for all donated meals, over 10,300 meals would go to homeless people around the city.

Using the support they received from students this semester as leverage, participants in the initiative say if Dining Services won't be more cooperative, they will revert to their original plan and simply take food from the dining halls, said Oxenhandler.

"There's a lot of bargaining power on the student's side," Pan said.

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