Garrett Curtis, Photography Editor

Students will soon be able to apply to recoup some course material costs thanks to the Yale College Council.

The YCC Senate on Sunday approved $11,000 in new spending to fund a course material reimbursement program and expand an annual food truck festival.

The course materials grant, sponsored by Davenport Senator Aaron Lin ’28 and Timothy Dwight Senator Alexander Medel ’27, appropriates $6,000 to offset the cost of academic materials for undergraduates, with particular focus on those from first-generation and low-income backgrounds. The program will reimburse up to 120 students for as much as $50 each.

The reimbursement form will be released to the public on Oct. 12 at 2 p.m.

“Students have reported that they spent around $50 to $100 each year on course materials,” Lin said at the meeting. “This will offset a big portion of the students’ cost of material.”

These two moves — the reimbursement and the funding for the Fall Food Truck Festival — stand as the largest financial decision made by the YCC this semester, save its record-breaking $1.2 million budget appropriation.

The reimbursements bill cites survey responses collected last spring from 112 respondents showing that nearly 70 percent of students could not access their academic materials through Yale’s library system, while two-thirds spent between $50 and $100 per semester on books.

In approving the proposal, the senate renewed a program it funded last school year, when the council distributed $5,000 for academic materials in the spring. Micah Draper ’28, the YCC financial policy director, emphasized at the meeting that the initiative fits within the Council’s larger effort to advocate for long-term institutional solutions to academic affordability.

The YCC adopted a similar proposal in the spring of 2024 that distributed $6,000 to 100 students. In the fall that year, the YCC also distributed $5,000 for course materials.

“We realize that YCC, as a larger body, should be advocating for change at the institutional level,” Draper said. “As financial policy director, I would be so happy to have this now, contingent on the fact that we’re still taking larger strides.”

The senate also approved a $5,000 allocation for the YCC’s food truck festival, an event that organizers hope will become a campus tradition. The festival, which debuted in the spring, brought hundreds of students to Cross Campus for free meals from local food trucks and engagement with the council’s policy teams.

“This year, we’re hoping to make it even larger,” Trumbull Senator Benjamin Barkoff ’27, the proposal’s sponsor, said. “We’re hoping to secure more vendors, reduce the lines, and also have more funding to be able to serve more students.”

The proposal envisions expanding the festival “into a larger community gathering” that includes local businesses, student organizations, and possibly a temporary street closure. Policy teams will table the event to share updates on YCC projects and collect feedback from attendees.

Barkoff noted that he hopes all policy teams will table and talk with the community at the food truck festival.

He added that he hopes to hold the event earlier in the semester than last year’s festival, which took place in late spring, to better align with the YCC’s fall survey campaign. The survey helps guide the Council’s policy priorities for the remainder of the academic year.

“The YCC Senate’s most tangible and often most impactful work is always done through funding stipends and running events. This past Sunday, we accomplished both,” YCC Speaker Alex William Chen ’28 wrote in a statement to the News.

Both proposals passed the senate unanimously.