Every Thursday night, while students have their midnight snack, finish up homework, hang out with friends or tuck themselves into bed, meal swipes for the week reset at midnight, with no extra thought paid.
Jack Wenz, FCRH ’26, and Andres Caballeros, FCRH ’26, thought about this. The pair estimates that over the course of an academic year, over thousands of meal swipes go unused due to students having a larger meal plan than they actually need.
Students don’t lose anything when their meal swipes expire and will have a new collection of them for the upcoming week every Friday morning. According to the New York State Department of Health, 39% of Bronx adults experience food insecurity, the highest in all five boroughs.
“Walking around the Bronx — specifically the Arthur Avenue area — as a [first-year] during orientation and passing residents who are either on the street homeless or in public housing and unable to feed themselves, something about just passing these people by felt so ignorant and wrong,” said Wenz. “We are guests in this neighborhood. A lot needs to be done about the philosophy of charity in this country. NYC is a microcosm of the very wealthy and of people passed over. It’s beyond devastating.”
Wenz started off by collecting non-perishable items to donate to Part of the Solution (POTS), purchased from Provisions on Demand (POD) in the Queen’s Court Deli with dining dollars donated by students at the end of the academic year. POTS is a community center located just a few blocks away from Fordham University’s Rose Hill campus and helps people in need by providing a place to shower, receive mail, visit a doctor, obtain legal services, get a haircut and eat a meal.
While Wenz was working on his personal project of donating non-perishables, Caballeros started donating meals purchased with students’ leftover meal swipes. Through an introduction, Wenz and Caballeros found out that the pair had the same goal in mind: to help feed others in need. Thus, Fordham Food Walks was created in the fall of 2023.
Fordham Food Walks is an initiative where a group of students purchase sandwiches with their leftover meal swipes every Thursday night to be donated to POTS. Wenz and Caballeros pick up the sandwiches from POD every night with a team, store them in fridges overnight, and then walk them over to POTS the following day. Since starting, they’ve donated over 5,200 meals.
“Part of community service is to do your part for the community, and this specifically felt wrong to not do something about. We are donating leftover meal swipes — if we didn’t do something about them, they would just go to waste,” said Caballeros. “We should always try to contribute, not just excess, but once you think about it, you have to go through with it. Seeing the amount of poverty and food insecurity around you, you have to do something about it.”
To the pair’s knowledge, a program like this was never active at Fordham in its history. “It’s surprising that this has never been done here [to our knowledge] because it’s just so simple and easy,” said Wenz. “We’re still able to go to classes and do other things.” Caballeros added, “There hasn’t been one week [during the school year] where we have taken a week off.”
When dorm rooms empty out for the year in May, however, the people in need of meals at POTS are still here. “When we [Fordham] went on breaks, especially summer break, POTS felt it,” said Wenz. “People we work with at POTS have expressed how much more dire the situation is getting. That wasn’t the case last fall, but now when you go to POTS, there’s a line around the block.”
Wenz and Caballeros expressed much appreciation for the workers at Boar’s Head, and shared that they have been “extraordinarily supportive” of Fordham Food Walks. “This is in line with Fordham’s own values that they endorse and live up to,” said Wenz. “To be in an environment of such affluence while there are people that can’t get by is so disheartening, especially with how much waste there is.”
The duo has set a goal of donating 5,000 meals a semester before they graduate in spring 2026. “There’s a philosophy there of inspiring people to look around their community and see what you can do,” said Caballeros.
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