Joshua Ibarra is a fourth-year journalism and Japanese language student at East Los Angeles College. He takes four courses and walks to and from class across the 82-acre campus in Monterey Park, California. He lugs his backpack, filled with $200 textbooks, his pockets as empty as his growling stomach.

13 percent of students at two-year colleges and 11 percent of those at four-year schools do not have enough to eat.

In November students at Spelman and Morehouse colleges in Atlanta staged a hunger strike to change a policy that prevented them from giving their unused meals to classmates in need. Student protesters ate vitamins and drank water in solidarity with the roughly 1,400 students on both campuses who did not have a meal plan or regular access to food at school.

A petition circulated proposing that Spelman and Morehouse implement a Swipe Out Hunger system allowing students to share excess swipes on their meal plan cards.

Rachel Sumekh, founder and CEO of Swipe Out Hunger, told The 74 that she is working closely with student leaders and administration to bring the “Swipes” program to campus.

Sumekh points out that the students her organization helps are the same ones who qualified for free and reduced-price lunch when they were younger.

Read the full article on college hunger by Kei-Sygh Thomas at The 74