At midnight on Skid Row, a limo stops on the street as the back door opens and a woman is pushed onto the curb before the car drives off again. Men sitting on the sidewalk are lighting up crack pipes as Jonathan Chi-Lin Lee and his friends arrive to hand out sandwiches to the homeless.
It was Lee’s first trip handing out meals on Skid Row, an area in downtown Los Angeles that contains one of the largest homeless populations in the country, as part of his Swipes for the Homeless program. When they began handing out meals, he was sure there was no way they would be able to get rid of all the food in the trunk of his car.
“At first it seemed like so much food,” said Lee, who graduated in 2009 with a degree in political science. “The back of my car was packed.”
But in minutes, word spread throughout Skid Row. People began flooding toward the car, and within a half hour, the trunk was empty, leaving a line of more than 100 people waiting.
“It had gotten pretty late, and here was a huge line of people wanting food at 1 a.m.,” Lee said. “That was when I really saw how bad the situation at Skid Row was.”
Swipes for the Homeless is a program created by Lee in which students can use their meal swipes to donate sandwiches and snacks to the homeless in downtown Los Angeles.
In 2009, third-year neuroscience student Bryan Pezeshki established a separate program with the same name.
Pezeshki’s Swipes for the Homeless is an official UCLA organization that works with UCLA Dining Services to provide individual hot meals prepared by the dining hall and also collects canned food, clothing and books for donation.
The National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty recently spotlighted the group in a report called “A Place at the Table: Prohibitions on Food Sharing with Homeless People,” which showed that as homelessness has increased as a result of the economic recession, the number of laws that criminalize behaviors necessary for people experiencing homelessness, such as sleeping or eating in public, have increased as well, said Whitney Gent, the center’s development and communications director.
Lee also served as a panelist in a webinar hosted by the center on July 29, which featured the authors of “A Place at the Table” discussing topics in their report.
As a panelist, Lee offered an alternative way of solving the homelessness problem with a program that actively helps the homeless, rather than penalize them, Gent said.
“We do not support laws which criminalize food sharing, but we also recognize that we need to be able to offer constructive alternatives, and Jonathan’s work with Swipes for the Homeless is a great example of such an alternative,” she said.
During fall quarter of his freshman year, Lee started Swipes for the Homeless after noticing the waste and inefficiency around him as students swiped for unwanted pizzas and drinks to use up the extra swipes they had at the end of the quarter.
The organization began setting up a table outside Bruin Café where students could donate their unused swipes at the end of every quarter in exchange for sandwiches and snacks that volunteers would later hand out to the homeless at Skid Row.
With the help of the National Law Center, Lee is now working on taking the idea behind Swipes for the Homeless to a national level. Food gleaning, the official term for donating leftover food, is protected by the Emerson Good Samaritan Food Donation Act of 1996, which limits the legal liability of anyone who donates food in good faith, Lee said.
“There is no national movement for food gleaning, which is a shame because we’re not taking advantage of this law,” Lee said.
Lee has helped groups at UC Irvine and Berkeley implement their own food-donation organizations, while individuals at Virginia Tech, Columbia University and the University of Pennsylvania have expressed an interest in starting their own programs, he said.
“If you see the statistics about how much food the U.S. wastes, it’s really sickening,” Lee said. “As college students, we have the resources and the time to do something about it.”
Lee took his interest in the issues around poverty and hunger and homeless and made them actionable, said D’artagnan Scorza, a former student Regent who graduated in 2007 and is director and founder of the Social Justice Learning Institute, a nonprofit organization dedicated to advancing social justice through academic support programs.
“Jonathan took classes and participated in activities that helped him build the skills to turn his idea into action and get the appropriate training and talk to the right people,” Scorza said. “That’s how I came to know him: he came to me and asked me for advice.”
After witnessing the homelessness and poverty of people on Skid Row and learning about the structural issues that often drive homelessness the lack of low income housing and mental health services, to name a few ”“ Lee said he feels an obligation to help.
“It’s not that they’re lazy, a lot of them have jobs,” he said. “Once you learn about the issues, a lot of myths about them dissolve, and once you see that situation, you kind of have to help.”