Food Justice and Basic Needs Team Makes Great Strides

By: Alicia Kwan, Diana Ngyuen, Maninder Kaur, Jasmine Summers- Evans, Rosemary Wallace, Melinda McMonigle, and Fiona Zhang.

The month of April has certainly been a busy one for the Food Justice and Basic Needs team! Throughout Earth month we’ve made important strides in our research and can’t wait for what the remaining months will hold for our team.

As mentioned previously, the team has chosen to make two subcommittees. One committee of team members is working on revamping the website and gaining insight and knowledge from Scott Gruber, who has been so gracious with offering his expertise to us. They have been working closely with Scott and meeting with him at least once a week to go over website development ideas such as color schemes, layouts, design templates, and much more. Through Scott we hope to be able to provide a comprehensive idea of what we as students would like to see the Basic Needs Office achieve with their website. The other committee is working on the survey and focus groups. This committee has already completed the survey and has been focusing their efforts this past two weeks on gaining survey responses. The feedback has been amazing and we’ve received over 300 survey responses thus far! We will also be conducting focus group meetings with students who noted their interest in participating on the surveys very soon.

Finally, this week we met with Chidera and Nicole to discuss our current progress and what they would like to see us do with the project moving forward. They gave us important insight into the focus groups and the types of questions that we should be asking. After the meeting we left feeling excited about our project and moving forward with our endeavors. We also tabled at the Earth Day Fair on April 22 and were able to tell students about our research and receive more survey responses as well.

Tabling at the Earth Day Fair! We got to talk to students about the importance of basic needs and of the research we’re doing. Left to right: Alicia, Jasmine, Melinda.

Website committee hard at work with Scott! Rosemary (left) is intently listening to Scott’s ideas and Jasmine (right) is looking for inspiration through other websites.