Food Justice and Basic Needs Blog Post: May 17, 2019

Recognizing and Celebrating a Year of Progress

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

As the end of spring quarter and our SAR program term become progressively near, our team has spent these past few weeks recognizing and celebrating all of the progress that has been made in terms of our set goals for the quarter, as well as the greater scope of environmental work being done at UCLA as a whole. A few of our team members were able to attend the 2019 UCLA Green Gala, where leaders in sustainability, student projects, and other sustainability‐related accomplishments were recognized and awarded for their efforts in helping to make UCLA a more sustainable campus.

Jasmine, Rosemary, and Diana attending this year’s Green Gala!

After working with Nicole from the Community Programs Office, we were able to compile a list of questions to create and distribute a pre‐screening tool to focus group participants. This pre‐screening tool helped us formulate small groups and gain an initial understanding of our participants’ backgrounds and their familiarity with existing basic needs resources before conducting our actual focus group discussions. We have been in contact with our focus group participants and look forward to opening up conversations around food security and basic needs resources on campus to gain even more insight on how to increase accessibility and resource proficiency among students.

Scott Gruber, who we have been lucky enough to have consult our website designing, shared a presentation on public speaking with our entire SAR program this past week to help prepare us for our upcoming final presentations. With Scott’s tips and suggestions in mind, we look forward to sharing with the rest of the SAR teams, stakeholders, and IoES community all of the work we have done to increase resource accessibility and proficiency on UCLA’s campus.