Increasing Student Accessibility to UCLA’s Basic Needs Resources 

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

The past two weeks for the Food Justice and Basic Needs Team has consisted of progressing in our research and sharing our newfound knowledge with our peers.

Each team member has been assigned one of the seven pillars of basic needs (financial wellness, food security, mental health, safety, security, housing, and accessibility) to research what campus resources best tackle each pillar. The last two weeks we have been searching for campus organizations, clubs, offices, and websites that address our assigned basic need, and we have been compiling relevant information to present to our stakeholder next week.

Through leading the SAR class activity, we were able to convey important basic needs resources through map design. The goal of the activity was to survey students’ knowledge of a wide range of campus resources in order to discover if the resources are well-known and accessible to students. We conducted the activity by having students locate specific organizations and features (like the 580 Cafe or microwaves) on a campus map. Not to our surprise, many of our peers struggled in locating basic needs resources and some were not even aware they existed. Gauging the class reaction was helpful in our research as it showed us that campus basic needs resources need more publicity in order to be universally accessible across UCLA. We concluded the activity with a presentation to recap the function and location of many campus resources and then asked the class to partake in a survey that would provide us with opinions as to how students best absorb information (via email or flyering, etc.).

From the information we researched on campus resources as well as the class feedback on attaining information, we are moving forward to present our research on the basic needs webpage and distribute the URL to students in the most effective manner.

This is a screenshot of the survey we sent out to the SAR class. We plan to distribute this survey further in the coming week to reach a wider audience.

This is a slide from our class activity presentation. Food resources are abundant on campus and it is crucial for students in need to be able to access and locate them.