Use it or lose it! That is the message that USCard Services emailed students who still had a dining dollar balance before Thanksgiving break.
Dining dollars are a prepaid balance that can be used at campus residential and retail café venues. They cannot be refunded, sold, or carried over to another semester, and they are not the same as meal swipes, which can only be used at the dining halls.
The general idea of the reminder was that students should eat up their dining dollars by Dec. 18 or they will go to waste. But the email failed to mention that there is a program that repackages donated dining dollars and converts them into meal swipes for students who face food insecurity. These meal swipe bundles are distributed by USC Student Basic Needs.
The Dining Dollar Donation Drive is now solely run by USC Hospitality, but it used to operate under the Trojans Give Back banner. When that group ran the program, they raised over 55,000 dollars’ worth of meals.
We asked students outside the Ronald Tutor Campus Center if they knew about the donation drive. A couple said they did. But most did not.
“I did not know that. I feel like all my friends are always in like, immense state of panic because they have so much money left over and they don’t know what to do with it,” said Shaleez Razavi, a second-year pre-law student.
Freshman Berlin Botyanscki says he would’ve told others about the program had he known sooner.
“I mean, can’t let the money go to waste, right?” Botyanscki said.
Dr. Sarah Portnoy is a USC professor who teaches about food and social justice issues in the Latinx communities of Los Angeles. She was surprised to hear that many students were unaware of the Dining Dollar Donation Drive.
“They should make that part of the freshman orientation,” Portnoy said. “That program is not new. It’s been around for a while now, and it’s at many universities.”
If you are interested in donating your unused dining dollars at the end of the year, the first step is to download the USC mobile order app.
Yoav Gillath, co-founder of Trojans Give Back, explained what to do next.
”The button would appear on the mobile order app, and then you hit that, and then it wouldn’t donate immediately,” Gillath said.
Gillath said students don’t choose how much to donate to the program. Instead, if a student chooses to donate their unused dining dollars, the entire remaining balance is donated when the semester ends.
“You don’t have to decide right then and there, you know, ‘I want to donate 50 bucks or whatever,’ just whatever you have left,” Gillath said. “And then that money goes through USC hospitality to USC basic needs and services, and it gets bundled up into meal swipes. And then those meal swipes are available to students with demonstrated financial need.”
So now you know: If you are going to have unused dining dollars as of Dec. 18, make a plan to donate them now.