CSUMB’s basic needs program reveals desperation – and a simple fix.

On a recent Thursday afternoon, The Hub at CSU Monterey Bay is buzzing. It’s a hybrid grocery store/thrift shop, and roughly a dozen students and a few staff members are grabbing bananas, spices and used shoes lined up neatly on a shelf.

It’s actually more food pantry than grocery store – everything in here is free to the CSUMB community, on a limited basis. You can grab up to one item daily from Zone 1, for instance, and up to two during finals. (On this day, Zone 1 includes canned peas, enchilada sauce, and bags of pinto beans.) You can grab up to five items from Zone 2 (crackers, tortillas). Fresh produce – including curly kale, broccolini, celery – is unlimited. Junior Kris Bohrk, a Japanese student, is filling a bag with Brussels sprouts. “I used to hate Brussels sprouts until my first boss made them for me,” she says. “Just a little bit of olive oil, salt and pepper, bake at 375. It’s fantastic what you can find in here.”

Last semester, Bohrk started every school day here to grab a free breakfast. That’s not uncommon for The Hub, which averages 350 “customers” a day, up from 60 one year ago. Last year, there were 16,000 visits; so far this semester, 3,600 individuals have visited 25,000 times.

Some of this spike might be due to inflation and represents increasingly desperate times. Some probably comes from improvements to the space itself, which moved across the old student center to make way for El Centro, a resource space for Latino students, into a more open, inviting space.

And the idea of creating a lively, inviting space – the exact opposite of whatever comes to mind when you summon “food pantry” to mind – comes from the team behind CSUMB’s Basic Needs Initiative. Joanna Snawder-Manzo, CSUMB’s care manager, started in 2015.

She would receive referrals for students who needed extra support – they might be in crisis, or failing out academically. “I noticed the students were stressed because they didn’t have enough money for food and books,” she says. “There was a strong correlation between students being in distress and not having their basic needs met.”

The Basic Needs Initiative has expanded to a team of three. Robyn DoCanto oversees The Hub and its student employees; Amy Zamara, the basic needs case manager, oversees a team of interns who are master’s students of social work and meet with students who need their services.

The trio scrapes together funds through grants and donations – beyond their allocation of $136,000 annually from the CSU Chancellor’s Office – to make the suite of services a reality, with a budget of $200,000 this year. (CSUMB President Vanya Quiñones allocated funds for the fridge, to enable perishables to be distributed through The Hub.)

The food in The Hub comes from a variety of sources, predominantly the Food Bank for Monterey County, as well as churches, occasional grocery store donations and beyond. Towers of nonperishable goods like cornbread mix, canned tomato sauce and diapers are stacked in what used to be the Starbucks, before the new student center opened.

The clothing section of The Hub is heavy on kids’ attire; 1 in 5 CSUMB students are parents, Snawder-Manzo says. Up to 50 percent of students are food-insecure.

If education is meant to be the great equalizer, we need to equalize education. To do that, we need to make sure that even the neediest students get their basic needs met.

It’s a premise we hear about a lot in K-12 education, with initiatives like free school lunch for all – hungry kids can’t learn, the logic goes.

The same logic applies in college. If students are desperate, how are they going to really dig deep into reading Socrates or comprehending that chemistry equation?

It’s hard to imagine that free boxes of mac-and-cheese or bunches of kale are really going to help close the disparities that exist in higher education, but an hour in The Hub makes you think that they really can. Zamara says she recently overheard a student say that without this resource, they would never cook.

“We are trying to meet them where they are at,” she says. “It’s startling how big the need is.”

SARA RUBIN is the Weekly’s editor. Reach her at sara@mcweekly.com