For the first time in over a decade, Georgetown is considering switching from Aramark as its primary food service provider. As the primary food consumers and financiers on campus, we deserve a voice -- but our say has consistently been stymied behind red tape and closed doors.
We deserve more. More transparency, more inclusion, and more meaningful, guaranteed mechanisms for participation.
Our ask:
- A list of student-facing RFP Committee members
- A formal, transparent process for students to submit suggestions to the RFP Committee
- Guaranteed structural inclusion in the future
This is about more than who serves lunch.
Aramark, Georgetown's current food service provider, consistently makes the news for its ties to ICE, underpaid, incarcerated labor, neglect of religious and dietary needs, and opposition to workers' rights. At Georgetown alone, Aramark has been accused of surveilling student activists, impeding unionization, and discrimination, while racking up numerous citations for health and sanitation violations.
The alternative is simple. Georgetown should prohibit profits off food sold on campus, just like the California State University System. The CSU System requires that surplus funds generated from food sales must be reinvested into the universities, rather than syphon students' tuition money into large, private corporations. Education Code § 89905.
We recognize that large-scale change would be a giant leap. In the meantime, we are asking for incremental steps toward a social incubator model, employed by the likes of Johns Hopkins, the University of Chicago, and a number of other colleges and universities.
In social incubator contracts, the primary operator is contractually required to allocate retail space, subcontracts, and kitchen locations to local non-profits and social enterprises. Those non-profits and enterprises then hire and train marginalized or underemployed local residents to operate culinary providers on campus.
Here at Georgetown, we already have "The Corp," or Students of Georgetown, Inc., the undergraduate student-operated non-profit food provider with million-dollar annual revenues. In D.C., we have the likes of D.C. Central Kitchen feeding D.C. public schools. Our local ecosystem is prepared to support us as soon as we will let them.
Therefore, Georgetown should sign a contract that allocates at least 20% of revenue in services to local nonprofits and reserves additional percentages for local and minority-owned businesses, plain and simple. But, without the ability for students to provide feedback, our concerns may never reach the right decision-makers. That is why we are making the demands which follow below.
1. A List of Student-Facing RFP Committee Members and Representatives
After nearly a year of investigation, Abolition Advocacy Project finally learned how to get on the RFP Committee. Now that one of our members has been appointed, however, what we have learned is disappointing.
Only seven of more than forty committee members are students. That's less than one in five. More than one-fifth of the contract will certainly be paid for by students. More than one-fifth of campus food consumers will be students. This is not enough.
For some perspective, several comparable institutions have delegated the majority of the decision-making power to students, including all of the schools in the California State system (Education Code §89903(a)(2)) and University of Colorado Boulder. Numerous others guarantee in charters and agreements that students have much higher proportional representation than wee do: in the SUNY system, students hold more than one-third of the decision-making power (see, e.g., SUNY Albany, where students make up six out of sixteen voting members) and at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities, the Student Services Fee Committee exerts massive financial leverage over auxiliary operations which impact student fees.
The least we can ask for is access to the individuals who are voting in our place, especially those with student-facing positions who are intended to incorporate our feedback anyway.
2. A Formal Process for Student Feedback and Proposals
Members of the RFP Committee will ultimately review each prospective provider using a formal scorecard. Why can't students do the same?
We are asking that Georgetown create a student-facing vendor scorecard to present aggregated data to the RFP Committee as they are making their own decisions.
Georgetown should publish an aggregate summary of the student evaluations. Students should be able to see how many students participated, which criteria students considered most important, and how the committee incorporated student feedback into its final decision.
3. From now on, the following should be codified and public:
- a dollar threshold which triggers mandatory student representation in procurement decisions
- the proportion of students with voting power on deciding committees
- a formal mechanism to solicit feedback from the general student body
- publication of aggregate student feedback and vendor evaluations
- a requirement that student feedback be incorporated into the official procurement record
- the total number of committee members and the identities of student-facing members, even if only identifiable by role
Sincerely,
Abolition Advocacy Project