Student-athletes, undergraduates and alumni have come together to create a mutual aid fund to help those in the UCLA community affected by the COVID-19 pandemic.
When starting the online spring quarter, global health professor Maryam Farzanegan asked her new students how the COVID-19 pandemic had affected their lives. Her question ended up being the inspiration for a new student-led mutual aid fund at UCLA, 1 Student at a Time.
Farzanegan organized a group of students and released a survey to her class that produced four reoccurring responses of newfound hardships.
“We found four different things that seemed to come up in our survey,” said Brielle Kinkead, a second-year physiological science student and member of 1ST. “Lack of access to food, trouble with necessary things for school such as Wi-Fi (or) a quiet place to work, housing and also a lot of mental health problems as well.”
Chloe Castaneda, an alumna and former forward for UCLA women’s soccer, also is a member of 1ST. In her senior season, Castaneda scored six goals, three of which came in the Bruins’ last two NCAA tournament games. After her season, she was drafted by the Houston Dash of the National Women’s Soccer League in January but instead chose to go abroad and play in Spain. But when the pandemic ended her season, Castaneda decided to commit time to 1ST.
Castaneda and other 1ST members were inspired by projects happening now at Scripps College and UC Berkeley.
“Scripps, for example, they started their own student-led mutual aid fund, at UC Berkeley they started a fund of their own, and Scripps ended up raising over $52,000 and deploying it within two months,” Castaneda said. “This is what sparked our inspiration and led us to establish this UCLA students-for-students solidarity fund.”
Kinkead believed that given the success Scripps had, UCLA could replicate or perhaps even outperform Scripps, given the Bruin undergraduate student body is nearly 30 times larger than that of the women’s college. While this fact meant more UCLA students were likely in need, it also meant there were more students who could possibly donate to their classmates.
“UCLA obviously has a super big student population and so there’s going to be a lot of students that need funds. But at the same time, that’s so many different students that can come together to support this effort and to support their peers,” Kinkead said. “Right now we have a lot more applicants than we have funds raised, but if we can even just help a few students, I think that will be great.”
The model used by 1ST involves raising money through GoFundMe and Venmo, with the group having already raised nearly $9,000 as of Sept. 17. The group has also partnered with a number of UCLA dance organizations and provided dance workshops to try to raise money for the fund, among other fundraising events.
In order to gauge students’ current financial struggles, 1ST released an application for UCLA students evaluating the applicant’s financial need through a variety of factors such as household income, employment status and housing status.
The application also guided applicants to already available UCLA funds and how 1ST can help with the requested funds.
“We are a resource for covering expenses that cannot be met by other sources provided by UCLA,” the application stated. “Before requesting funding, please examine these financial resources to see if you can have your needs met by another source.”
The group guiding the project are diverse in age and major, with some members’ being alumni such as Castaneda and gymnast Anna Glenn.
Prior to graduating in 2020, Glenn was an NCAA champion in 2018 with the Bruins. In her second-to-last season at UCLA in 2019, she was an honorable mention for the Pac-12 All-Academic team.
“I had a really positive experience at UCLA and within the athletic community as well,” Glenn said. “So I want to do everything I can as an alumni now to support the current student-athletes and current students that are there.”
1ST has been able to use the platforms many UCLA athletes have in order to spread the word about the organization. Given their connections, the group reached out to another UCLA gymnastics alumna, Katelyn Ohashi – who boasts over 1 million Instagram followers – hoping to bring her on board as an ambassador for the cause.
On Sept. 15, 1ST began fulfilling funding requests and will continue doing so through at least Oct. 1.
“When school first moved online and we started to identify these unique challenges that students were facing as well as ourselves, it kind of makes you feel helpless,” Castaneda said. “That’s something that motivated us, to find what were actionable things we could do that could directly affect positively the lives of our fellow students.”
