From trailer to permanent home: UC Irvine reopens its Basic Needs Center at new site
When UC Irvine’s FRESH Basic Needs Hub opened in 2017, Andrea Mora was the only full-time employee manning the 1,800-square-foot trailer located in the parking lot of the coming Mesa Court residence expansion.
“At the time, it was just me and 10 part-time student staff,” Mora said. “That’s all I had. Now, if I’m including the two social workers and a financial aid counselor, there is 11 full-time staff, and we have around 50-plus student assistants in addition to being a site host for the California Volunteers College Corps. We’ve grown significantly, right? Going from one full-time employee to 11, you can just imagine.”
It’s not just the size of the staff that’s grown at the center, Mora said, but its overall scope, which merited rebranding the FRESH Basic Needs Hub to the UCI Basic Needs Center, made official with the “reopening” of its new permanent location Tuesday.
At the time of its opening, the FRESH Basic Needs Hub focused on providing food, toiletries and other goods to students struggling with food inequity as part of the UC Global Food Initiative, which was launched in 2014 under the direction of former UC President Janet Napolitano. It’s now expanded its scope to helping with housing insecurity and financial wellness, all while continuing to serve as a food pantry for students in need.
In what Mora calls the “peak pandemic years,” the center also made efforts to help students who couldn’t physically access the center with grocery cart assistance and transportation by way of Lyft gift cards or vouchers.
“We provided more programming on the financial wellness side. Students could learn how to create a budget and how to lessen their expenses. It’s the education, giving people the preventive pieces so they have power over the little resources they may have. Along with all that evolution, the staff capacity, the number of resources — we were meeting needs that we weren’t before,” Mora said.
That naturally led to the rebrand. Mora said it was common for students to misunderstand the hub as only offering food resources. The new, simplified name lets those they serve know she and her staff are around to provide students their basic needs, she said.
Though the $500,000 renovations took place between April and December last year, the official reopening was put off until this month because, according to Mora, she wanted to finalize all the details of the space before celebrating. That said, she noted the center hasn’t seen a break in its service in all that time as most of the furniture was moved at the start of the winter quarter.
So far this year, Mora said, the center has served about 2,766 students with 20,000 visits over all. Last school year, the center saw 5,232 students making 16,257 visits.
“We are [now] in a more central campus location that’s more accessible. We’re across the street from a free shuttle stop. With the centrality of the location and being in a permanent building — it’s a one stop shop,” Mora said. “All the staff and services that we have, we’re all centrally located in the same space.
“[It] is really important for us to not have students have to retell their stories or explain their needs to strangers again and again, but to just be able to be supported in one space as fast and effectively as possible,” she said.
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