Bruin to Bruin: Swiping Out Hunger with Rachel Sumekh - Daily Bruin Thursday, Aug. 13, 2026 AdvertiseDonateSubmit NewsSportsArtsOpinionThe QuadPhotoVideoIllustrationsCartoonsGraphicsThe StackPRIMEEnterpriseInteractivesPodcastsGamesClassifiedsPrint issues IN THE NEWS: Big Ten Previews 2026 Podcasts Bruin to Bruin: Swiping Out Hunger with Rachel Sumekh Photo credit: Shrey Chaganlal By Kayla Hayempour Feb. 10, 2025 12:03 p.m. Host Kayla Hayempour talks with UCLA alum Rachel Sumekh, founder of Swipe Out Hunger, about turning a small campus initiative into a national movement against college food insecurity. Rachel shares her journey, the impact of student activism and how legislation she helped craft has secured over $100 million for campus hunger programs. Plus, UCLAs Carl Maier joins to discuss Swipe Out Hungers work today. Kayla Hayempour: Hello and welcome to Bruin to Bruin, the show where we sit down with members of the UCLA community to hear their story and advice they have for students. My name is Kayla Hayempour, and Im a podcast contributor at the Daily Bruin. Today, Ill be interviewing alum Rachel Sumekh, an entrepreneur and strategy consultant. Rachels clients include startups, nonprofits and philanthropies. She learned how to make change happen as the founder of Swipe Out Hunger, where she was CEO until 2022. Swipe Out Hunger began in 2009 with a few friends at UCLA and its network has since scaled to 900 universities serving millions of nourishing meals. The organization is the leading nonprofit ending college student hunger and collaborates with colleges, legislators and the greater community to address student food insecurity. In 2017, Rachel wrote The Hunger Free Campus Act, which has been introduced in 22 states, sending over $100 million plus dollars to anti-hunger programs on campus. Rachels work has been recognized by the Obama White House and landed her on the Forbes 30 under 30 list. She continues her advocacy for students as a board member at the Los Angeles Community College Foundation. Rachel credits her Iranian Jewish parents for her intersectional perspective and warm leadership style. In 2019, I was matched with Rachel for mentorship through the Los Angeles Jewish Federations Teen Innovation Grant Program, where I was working on my own advocacy project. Six years after being mentored by Rachel, Im excited to be speaking with her today. Rachel, thank you for coming on and welcome to the show. Rachel Sumekh: Kayla, Im so excited to be in conversation with you. KH: I want to start from the very beginning. I know your Iranian Jewish heritage is really important to you. What did that mean growing up? How do you think that shaped you and your value system? RS: If I can actually take it a step back so as you mentioned, both my parents are Iranian Jews who came to the U.S. and really never expected to, right? For 3,000 years, Jews had lived in Iran. This was where we had our own food, had our own language, had our own culture, and coming here, my parents really instilled in us a sense of community and connection and groundedness, an attempt to almost rebuild what we lost back home. So I grew up in a very tight knit, welcoming, warm, just the kind of community you want to be raised in. And when I came to UCLA, I think I started to realize a lot more of, one I did not know what people think about Jewish community. They think of Jewish summer camp and bagels and lox. Those are two things Id literally never heard of in my life until I got to campus. But really, for me, my identity is just a sense of groundedness, like we have been through so much. We have rebuilt and we are still joyful and comedic and welcoming, and so I really hold on to those values. And instead of just keeping that to our own sense of selves, I open that to everyone, like the table that I sit at, in my mind, is welcoming for everyone. KH: Absolutely, I love that. I think definitely some things that resonate with me are resilience and openness. Judaism has this value of tikkun olam, helping to repair the world, and so I think those values have definitely also shaped me and also coming to UCLA. Ill transition into your experience there, we know it now as the Persian center of Los Angeles. Was it always like that for you? Did you feel very at home coming to campus? Or, was it a little bit of a culture shock, not just with the you know, I do think a lot of what people think is Ashkenazi Judaism. When people found out Id never tried matzah ball soup before, it was like the world was ending. So I relate to you, but in terms of just general campus climate, what was that transition like for you? RS: One of the best things I did at UCLA was take Farsi, I think like Farsi for native speakers, which was with Khanoom Hagigi and now with Dr. Sahba. And it is the most LA thing ever that there is a class at the public university for people who grew up speaking. So many of us grew up speaking Farsi, but not knowing the grammar, how to read and write, that theres a whole class, and it was packed. So I think that class was the embodiment of campus life for me, one because it was a place unlike many other places on campus where Iranian students, whether youre Jewish or Bahai or Muslim or agnostic or not even Persian or religious, youre in a space together, and youre able to connect. I know theres always really wonderful relationships I made in that class. And we went to Persian restaurants together. So I think if theres anything that captures the Persian experience, its walking into that classroom on any given day and seeing all these first-gen Iranian students and maybe even second-gen now, understanding what our culture means in the modern context. There was also a class for many years by Dr. Sahba, another Saba Soomkeh, who, actually, its no longer there, but Dr. Soomekh, of no relation, unfortunately, led a class on the history of Iranian Jews in LA for many years. And it was so cool to kind of have a sense of like, okay, this is history of the past 30, 40, years, but youre still making that history as a student here. KH: Definitely, and something that I feel also is just the way that so many other students on campus that maybe have no connection to Persian culture are so welcoming or excited to learn more about it. For a lot of people in my life, I am the first Persian person theyve ever met. And so when I find out that they go and get faloodeh at Saffron and Rose, Im just like, Oh my gosh, wow, thats your favorite flavor. So its exciting to be in a community that is so supportive of the fact that there are so many different students with so many different types of upbringings, and yet theres a warmth and an acceptance and a joy when it comes to sharing parts of those cultures with people around you. And Westwood with the food, is the perfect place to do that, for sure. RS: I mean, how lucky are we to have food that is so good, that makes it so easy to invite people in through. My husband is American, and he just, I mean, was in love with Persian food before we even met. So its a really wonderful asset that weve got. KH: Absolutely I think food is a bridge to humanity in a lot of ways, and thats actually the perfect segue into talking about Swipe Out Hunger. What was the motive or the thing that really drove you to start fighting the hunger crisis? Was there a particular experience that really changed the game for you? RS: I know youre sharing about this in the intro, but for those of you who dont know, Swipe Out Hunger is now a national organization that started at UCLA, and our entire mission is making sure that food is not the reason why someone doesnt graduate or doesnt do well on a test. So we help partner with over 900 campuses and managing their pantries, but also in making sure that if they have a dining hall, and theres a student who has 19P and those meal swipes are going to expire, that they have a chance to donate it to their peers. Their peers can access warm, nourishing meals in their dining hall. We also do a lot of policy and legislative work that Id love to get into. But honestly, the turning point for me, as I shared, I grew up in a very insular community. I grew up in the valley. Shout out to the 818. And my friends and I, when we first started Swipe, my friend Bryan Pezeshki, he organized the first swipe drive. And I remember we had collected like 1,000 swipes, and we werent at the point this is Swipe 1.0 we didnt have our meal swipe donation program yet, where you can donate the credits electronically to another student. It was literally pallets of food. So ORL and dining would order pallets of food that we then took to the food pantry in CPO, in the Student Activity Center. We were going to just move these pallets of food, but there were so many pallets, and me and Bryan were the only ones basically there and I said, Okay, Bryan, we have to reschedule this. Theres like 15 pallets, and its just you and me. Its a hot June day, and the only tool we have to move this is a move-in cart, which is going to take us forever. And he said, No, we told the university that we were going to do something important with this food, that people needed it, which is why they agreed to the program. So we have to do this today. And we spent the next five, six hours on a hot June day, moving this food up and down campus. And for me, it was a turning point in the sense that you realize that if you want to do something thats never been done before, its going to be uncomfortable. Youre not going to be clear on what the path is, but you have to do it. Similarly, when we started Swipe, even before that version, we were collecting boxes of food and Styrofoam boxes that students would bring out to our tables. And one day, one of the dining directors came over, slammed one of the boxes of food and said, Youre not allowed to do this on my campus. And Im dramatizing it a little bit, because that was our experience as students. Were like, Were trying to feed people. How dare you even tell us to stop? But it was a wake up call in the sense that I literally had never offended a single person until the age of 18, when I was at UCLA and was confronted with someone telling me I shouldnt do something that was good for the world. These are our meal swipes. Were trying to feed people. How is this not the right thing to do? And I suddenly became, with me and my friends, committed to changing the policy to make sure that anyone who wanted to do something like donate their meal swipes had the chance to. KH: Wow. Well, not only is that really profound, but I think its something that a lot of students on UCLA campus can relate to. Can you go more into what the mental toll was for you and how you overcame that? Because I have to imagine that maybe there were two sides. You were passionate and you wanted to keep going, but also there was maybe some doubt about whether you were going to actually be able to accomplish what it is that youve set out to do. How did you navigate that process? RS: You know, Kayla, I was so worried that I would be out of touch. But for you to say, nope, thats still a problem, were still experiencing, that makes me feel very comforted. Unfortunately. We knew what we were up against, which is a very large university that has so many cogs and wheels that for us to make them change would take a lot. So we gathered really influential friends that we had. One person was in a fellowship and the person who ran the fellowship was super influential, great. Bring them on our team. Oh, we got this recognition, lets make sure the school sees that. And we tried to amass as much power as possible, and also approach with proposals, come to meetings dressed nicely. We try to play by the rules, while leveraging as much power from the outside as we could so we werent just seen as students, we were seen as this validated initiative that needed to happen. KH: So transitioning into how Swipe grew, it started at UCLA. Youre …