Many Penn students simply don’t use all, or even many, of the dining hall meals their meal plan gives them. Indeed, the Liberty Meal Plan (the smallest of the compulsory freshman plans) would have you eat at the dining halls 10 times a week to fully use up the whole plan.

UA representative Mark Pan, in conjunction with leaders of More Than Pennies, Circle K, Sigma Alpha Mu, and several other organizations around campus, decided to put those leftover meals to good use: feeding the homeless. Unfortunately, there was considerable resistance to permitting the donation of meals outright – so the UA passed a forceful resolution in favor of meal donation.

Sure enough, a few weeks afterward More Than Pennies was allowed to station volunteers outside of all three dining halls on Wednesday, April 29. The event was publicized by freshman-wide email sent by the UA. After one day, More Than Pennies had 531 students donate 10,300 meals! Simply by donating their spare meals, over 1,000 people in Philadelphia homeless shelters had food.

This fantastic initiative attracted a lot of attention from the local media, featuring in MSNBC’s “Making a Difference” segment on May 23 (check out former UA Representative Grant Dubler around 2:00). Check it out below or here.