Last spring, Aileen George and Bryan Yannantuono headed an initiative to allow students to donate unused meal swipes to feed D.C.’s homeless.
It seemed easy enough.
After the duo cut through the expected red tape, Yannantuono and George were able to have the cashier at Block Express swipe an ID card 50 times and give them 50 donated boxed lunches. But they ran into problems when they had to transport the lunches.
“They gave us a cart that wasn’t even a cart, and we had all the meals and sodas and waters on it, and the wheels didn’t really work,” Yannantuono said. “That was the worst.”
Despite the hardships, they came back to Block Express five times and donated a total of 250 meals to Friendship Place, a center that helps homeless individuals near Tenleytown.
Yannantuono and George said they hope student efforts to fight homelessness and hunger will be easier this year now that the two started an official student group, AU Students Fighting Homelessness and Hunger. The club aims to work with existing organizations on campus and around the city to combat homelessness and hunger.
The founders said their focus this year will be getting off campus and helping the community.
George, a senior in the School of Public Affairs and the College of Arts and Sciences, said she developed the idea for the club after an internship with Student Public Interest Research Groups.
Last year, George, along with Co-President Yannantuono, a sophomore in SPA and the School of International Service, organized a clothing drive and AU Fights Homelessness and Hunger Week. They also organized an ice cream social benefiting Street Sense, the D.C. newspaper that works to raise awareness of issues homeless people face.
Austin Young, a sophomore in SPA, got involved with the group last year when he was asked by Yannantuono to help out at the Street Sense ice cream social.
Young’s hometown in Vermont had very few homeless people, he said, and when he first visited D.C. the number of homeless people in the city surprised him.
“I had never seen that before,” he said. “I talked to Phillip [a Street Sense vendor stationed in Tenleytown] and then saw him later at Best Buy, and he was a really cool guy.”
Yannantuono said he wanted to push AU to get a Street Sense subscription in the residence halls or get a Street Sense vendor to come closer to campus.
After his experience with meal swipe donations last year, Yannantuono also wants to focus on how to improve that process.
He said he wrote up a policy for Bon Appétit detailing how they could reform the system.
“I think that during finals week or just after finals week, you should be able to go on [my.american.edu] and say ‘I didn’t use this many meals’ and donate them to the University,” he said.
Apart from making it easier for students to donate meal swipes, the new club’s goals include being a resource for members of other organizations, such as fraternities and sororities, that are looking to serve the community.
George and Yannantuono said they want to work with organizations such as A Wider Circle, a non-profit organization in Silver Spring, Md., that provides basic necessities to people transitioning out of homelessness, and D.C. Central Kitchen. They also plan to again work with Bon Appétit to donate meal swipes.
AU Students Fighting Homelessness and Hunger will work with the Community Service Coalition, Community Action and Social Justice and D.C. Students Speak, an organization that tries to connect students at different D.C. universities to help them work toward common goals in the community.
At their first meeting, new members suggested events like a hot cocoa fundraiser for Street Sense, helping serve holiday dinners and a “trick-or-treat” for canned goods in the dorms.
The club also aims to raise awareness of homelessness in D.C., the U.S. and abroad.
Because homelessness is not a permanent situation for many people, it is difficult to estimate the number of people who are homeless in D.C. or the nation. An estimated three million people nationwide are homeless during a given year, including about 1.3 million children, according to the National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty.
George said that being in the nation’s capital gave AU students a unique opportunity to help out with a nationwide issue.
“Where our school is situated helps us reach out,” she said. “It’s not something that can end with one person. It’s a continual problem.”
But, she said, students have to get involved in order for the new club to make a real difference.
“We want to be a continual solution,” Yannantuono added.
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