At Final Meeting, HUA Leaders Allocate $20,000 for Student Travel, Storage, and Primal Scream Food Truck

The Harvard Undergraduate Association allocated funding for airport Uber vouchers, subsidized summer storage, and a Primal Scream food truck at its final meeting of the year, capping off the term of outgoing HUA Co-Presidents Abdullah Shahid Sial ’27 and Caleb N. Thompson ’27.

The three allocations — totaling $20,000 — passed unanimously and will carry into the terms of co-president elects Zachary “Zach” Berg ’28 and Daniel Zhao ’28, who will take office alongside a newly elected executive board. Sial and Thompson framed the package as infrastructure for their successors to build on.

The HUA renewed its summer storage contract with Harvard Student Agencies at $10,000, down from $19,000 last year. The program, which provides a $3-per-box subsidy to undergraduates storing belongings over the summer, spent only $7,200 in its last cycle.

“We only ended up using $7,200, so we thought it would be a better allocation if we end up reducing the capped amount to $10,000 instead, so we have some leftover money,” Sial said.

Sial said he and Thompson would sign the contract Sunday before handing off remaining logistics to Berg, Zhao, and Finn R. Berard ’29, the new residential life officer. The contract terms are unchanged from last year, apart from the lower cap.

“It’s just sending out a couple more emails,” Sial said.

The body also allocated $7,000 for the airport Uber voucher program, which distributes specialized links for free rides to 400 to 500 students during travel periods. The HUA will not run shuttle services next year — a shift HUA Well-Being Officer Joshua T. Eneji ’28 attributed to student preference.

“We’re not doing shuttles, but this was much more effective,” Eneji said. “Students voted that they prefer this to the shuttle system.”

Berard said roughly 100 students had responded to the interest survey so far, compared to about 800 last year, but that he expected turnout to climb as the program’s dates approached.

The HUA also approved $3,000 for a food truck at Primal Scream, the end-of-reading-period tradition in which undergraduates run naked through Harvard Yard at midnight. The truck will serve free food from 10 p.m. to 11:30 p.m., according to HUA Residential Life Officer Isabelle G. Agarwal ’28.

At the end of the meeting, Sial and Thompson addressed a room of outgoing and incoming officers, acknowledging that much of their original agenda had gone unrealized.

“Most of the stuff we said we would do, we ran into some issues, but within the stuff that we did, we were really happy that all of you played a very, very instrumental role,” Sial said.

“We were incredibly happy to have your support. And I’m more than excited to see what the next administration ends up doing,” he added.

Thompson pointed to the HUA’s alumni fund — launched last September with a $10,000 donation — and the recent uptick in the mandatory Student Activities Fee, which is expected to unlock an expanded budget for the incoming administration.

“The budget for the HUA is going to be the largest in its history,” he said. “The opportunity to interface with alumni more than we ever have is immense, and that’s obviously something that Zach and Daniel campaigned very hard on that makes me incredibly excited.”

Berg, who along with Zhao, pledged during the campaign to raise more than $2.1 million from alumni, closed the meeting by thanking Sial and Thompson for building out the fund.

“You need three good years of presidents in a row, because there’s no country in the world that has a one-year term for president,” he said. “Hopefully, we will be able to set in the groundwork for something that the next administration after us can build on.”

Berg added that he and Zhao had taken lessons from the seven-ticket race that brought them into office.

“We learned a lot from a lot of the other campaigns that we were running against. A lot of those ideas were genuinely just really brilliant,” he said. “We want to continue to listen, continue to hear what everyone has to say.”

—Staff writer Alma T. Barak can be reached at [email protected] and on Signal at almabk.54. Follow her on X @almabk_.

—Staff writer Theresa F. Bartelme can be reached at [email protected] and on Signal at theresabartelme.15. Follow her on X @theresabartelme.