Students for a Self-Operated Dining System
About
Students for a Self-Operated Dining System works to create a self-operated dining service for the WWU campus. Self-operated dining is an effective choice among many students nationwide in which university dining services are run as a department of the university instead of contracted out to a large corporation like Chartwells Higher Ed (Compass Group), Aramark, or Sodexo. The University of Washington, Washington State University and Eastern Washington University all use the self-operated dining model. Making Dining Services a university-run department would give autonomy back to the university and student body to make dining choices that best align with our values and student desires.
WWU’s current contract with Aramark ends in Fall 2023. We must begin planning now in order to successfully transition to a new dining system and avoid re-upping our contract with a corporation like Aramark which profits from the prison industrial complex, serves unsafe food to incarcerated people (https://investigate.afsc.org/company/aramark), and engages in a system of kick backs which leads to them sourcing less healthy and less environmentally sustainable foods in order to make more money (https://www.realfoodgen.org/kickbacks-report-2020).
This year we hope to continue advocating for a self operated dining system as opposed to partnering with one of the "Big 3" (like Chartwells). Due to COVID having improved, we also hope to do more events outside of regular club meetings that align with our values of food sovereignty, social justice, resource sharing, intersectional environmentalism, and anti-prison industrial complex interests.
Please reach out to us via email at shredthecontract@gmail.com to join the campaign and have a say in your dining system! You can also follow or reach out to our IG shredthecontractwwu. We are rarely active on WIN, so the best place to talk to us is our IG or DM us there for our Discord link. Let's envision and implement a better system for dining at Western!
To get up to date on our club's accomplishments and Aramark/Chartwells vs Self Op, please read our Fall 2022 Intro PPT here!