Let’s say you wake up Saturday morning, and you live across the street from Tennyson High School, your hungry with no means of transportation and all you want to eat is some fresh fruit and a salad. Sounds trivial, you would think, but this means for this person he or she would have to walk a mile or more to get to a grocery store. More times than not the individual will choose to walk to the corner store a choice that provides a much less healthy option to eat. This person lives in a food desert, and that’s the reality for Tyrone Hood who lives on Shaffer street in Hayward, Ca who said if he didn’t have a car he would have to walk about two miles to get to the grocery store. “Yeah, I would have to walk up Tennyson to get to Food Max.”

Food deserts aren’t defined by metrics but by a group of social, economic factors. One is how many people are served by a particular grocery store for the surrounding neighborhood. Another is access to affordable fresh produce. Fifty liquor stores compared to one grocery stores in the neighborhood. If there’s adequate public transportation to the grocery store.

The daily challenges of living in a food desert combined with the social-economic problems that the majority of these food deserts are located in are necessary for the city to take into account to find solutions to ensure fairness and reciprocity.

Sofia Sanchez a Chabot College graduate and current student at the University of California saw a need in her community.  When she realized that her fellow students aren’t eating enough fruits and vegetables, she notices her friend constantly asking her for her snacks, and she realized that they never turned her down when she offered her food to her friends. Sofia and her fellow students put together a plan to have a food pantry at Chabot College once a month with their partnership with Alameda County Food Bank. They have been able to keep it going for the past two years. “Although it’s only a band-aid on top of the wound of food deserts I’m hoping we can acquire a space on campus for the students who can’t cook their own can come and get a hot, healthy meal as well as have more room for storage so that we can serve more people in our community.”

Begoña Cirera, MS RDN Nutrition Science & Health Faculty Lead at Chabot College to shed a little insight on the subject and she said “Although south Hayward may not qualify as a food desert in the strict definition of the USDA, I strongly believe that this particular community suffers from a lack of access to healthy, affordable fresh food, and too many families and individuals live on increasingly low incomes. The health consequences of such combinations can be devastating for all generations involved, from the pregnant mother to the children, to the grandparents. It is very well documented that a lack of daily fresh fruits, vegetables and whole grains in one’s diet can increase the risk for preventable, but chronic diseases such as Type II Diabetes, heart disease, and hypertension, to name a few. Let’s put it another way, we could not have too many grocery stores offering fresh, affordable produce, but we have too many convenience stores, 7/11’s, liquor stores, and fast-food restaurants that are creating more problems than solutions to our communities, present, and future generations.”

Food deserts are an important issue our city needs to pay attention to and find solutions for, right now the city is in the research phase to understand what exactly are the needs of the people and when their assessments are complete the city will move forward with plans to remedy the problem.

In the 1920s, philosopher John Dewey said, “Education Needs to start with the student’s neighborhood. Education needs to start where the students are able. Which is their homes and communities and neighborhoods.” And that’s exactly what Chabot’s Student Initiative Center (SIC) is all about. SIC is a student based center that supports the different clubs, events, and students at Chabot. As well as supporting, various organizations around the Hayward area.

Advised by Sean McFarland and Eric Heltzel, the center is mostly student ran. Students at Chabot come together to create these events and projects to help improve their own lives, the community, and the campus. Showing deep empathy for the different social issues that surround our community. “When the students are ready to pick up the hammer the teacher should be there to pick up the nails. We’re there to support, encourage, and help them achieve their passion”, Eric Heltzel said when hearing his students come up with these different ideas. The center is created for students, by the students.

In 2013, before SIC became what it is today, it first started as the Passion and Purpose class. As the Passion and Purpose classes were just getting started, Chabot student, Skye Ontivero created a film entitled, “The Passion Project.” A documentary that explores how colleges, can be the best support for students and how the relationship between your passion and your commitment to the community, whether it enables you to follow your passion or not. As in the Passion and Purpose class, it is now designed to not only help students discover their true passion but also to help their community.

SIC has become one of the first spaces that a community college has to offer. Where a center at a community college is able to help the city and Chabot’s students. Chabot College’s SIC offers different resources for students and teachers. Offering professional development for teachers on project-based learning (which will be from June 7 to June 8). However, for students, SIC allows groups of students into their center to help them finish their group projects. No campus provides this kind of support for their students. They want to teach their students the importance of project-based learning, and how effective it can be.

Now the Student Initiative Center is going more outside of Chabot College, working to help improve South Hayward. They have also gone above and beyond to bring aid and relief to people in Japan and the Middle East.

One of the most important things for a community college is to have a community. Not just within the college but also the communities that surround the college. Which is why SIC has decided to make it their mission to go outside of the college and support the cities around the Bay Area (Oakland, Fremont, Union City, Castro Valley, etc.). They will go anywhere and everywhere as long as a community needs help and support. Stating that “every school should be involved in their community.”

To learn more about the Student Initiative Center, go to https://sicchabot.wixsite.com/thesic. The SIC meets every Thursday at 3:00 and every Friday at 11 in room 2338.

South Hayward, or as city officials and workers see it on a map, the Tennyson Corridor has been recognized as “the forgotten stepchild of Hayward.”

The Hayward City Council meeting of June 20, 2017, included a two-year action plan for what the city calls The Tennyson Corridor Strategic Initiative.

The action plan itself, available on the Hayward city website, titled Tennyson Corridor Strategy Two-Year Business Plan (FY 2018 & 2019), states that its goal is to “Work with the community to create a community vision plan for the Tennyson Corridor and catalyst sites to serve as a foundation for long-term planning and policies.”

“Conduct empathy interviews with key stakeholders and a diverse set of community members to prepare for visioning sessions,” is the very first “action/task” listed on this document.

One of the developments of this relatively recent focus on South Hayward is the partnership between the city of Hayward and Chabot college through the Student Initiative Center (SIC), Chabot faculty Sean McFarland, Eric Heltzel, Tom DeWitt and all of the passionate Chabot students of the SIC doing the actual community outreach.

The City Council has acknowledged the voices of many concerned community members of South Hayward driving, walking, and witnessing the investment and development of downtown Hayward over the last decade.

Chabot professor and Hayward City Councilman Francisco Zermeño said, “Six years ago, I formed the Tennyson Community Committee to improve Tennyson road.”

Zermeño goes on, “I decided to push prioritization to Tennyson road because it became the forgotten stepchild of Hayward.”

“On April 11, 2017, City Council did a work session around the idea of focusing more on South Hayward. You’ve seen the big investment downtown for the last couple decades,” said Hayward Management Analyst Mary Thomas.

Thomas continued, “we want to figure out, what are the neighborhoods that people self-identify, and the collective aspirations and hopes for their area. With that, we want to create a vision plan for the City with some action-steps in a timeline.”

“The Tennyson corridor initiative is part of the cities effort to ensure, by forming partnerships, that Tennyson road and their community in South Hayward is not forgotten,” Zermeño adds.

This is where Pepperdine Universities Davenport Institute for Public Engagement and Civic Leadership came in.

“The Davenport Institute of Pepperdine University helps local governments with civic engagement. We recognize city workers are expert problem solvers, but they are not trained to facilitate conversations and discussions,” says Executive Director of the Davenport Institute Ashley Trim.

According to their public policy page, the Davenport Institute Public Engagement Grants, “seek to support communities by offering funded-service grants to offset the cost of consultants and outside facilitators in designing and implementing a vibrant civic engagement process.”

For clarification, the grants that the Davenport Institute have provided will help with the resources necessary for the vision plan and community outreach. They are not used for the brick and mortar development and improvement of the city.

Thomas, “called Davenport to ask if they would be willing for us to use the money to hire Chabot College to act as our consultant instead of hiring a more formal business.”

Trim adds, “It’s the first time we’ve seen this done with a college. Chabot and Hayward have already been working together in their communities. We were really excited about the idea of a college and its students working with the city. ”

“People are not always forthcoming with city workers. As a Staff person, people are reasonably a little suspicious as to why you’re asking them questions,” said Thomas.

Zermeño clarifies, “when most of our residents run into a city employee, it’s usually because the employee is there for something negative. The inspector, for example, comes in after someone has reported you for something you may not have done.”

“We think that people are more likely to be candid with students, in particular, students from the neighborhoods themselves.”

Celeste Marucut is a Chabot student and part of the SIC which is partnered with the city of Hayward through Chabot in this initiative.

Marucut says, “We are doing these interviews because we want to build a bridge between the city of Hayward, its organizations, and the community members. Too often, citizens do not know how to communicate what they want with the city of Hayward. Chabot students reaching out to the community helps us, and them, communicate what they’ve been feeling, and what they want to see Hayward become.”

SIC advisor, Sean McFarland, said, “The Davenport Institute at Pepperdine gives three grants a year to different cities around the nation who want to do innovative work to reach out to their citizens. This year, this project looked so cool to Davenport, they took all the grant money and put it to our grant alone.”

“The grant from the Davenport Institute goes directly to Chabot. The funding that would go to hire a consultant went to hire student assistants, and for supplies. The City has a separate contract with Chabot to help fund some of the faculty time in supervising the student assistants,” Thomas clarified.

“We hope to introduce the Council to a different way of presenting information,” said Thomas.

Chabot SIC student Blanca Ochoa, “made a scrapbook because there is so much information. I want to show how the issues in the community are connected. People from different neighborhoods are experiencing the same problems, or want the same things.”

“The art gallery that the students are putting together and displaying in City Hall on May 22 will be a first step where the City Council can see the art the students created from their interviews,” Thomas added.

Marucut is, “very opposed to just giving the city a report. I feel like it would be a waste of our time and all our hard work.”

City Councilman Francisco Zermeno agreed, “It’s about being active, not passive. If you’re passive about it, you read a report, which isn’t very impactful. We need a one on one personal relationship.”

So, where do we go from here?

SIC advisor Eric Heltzel states, “this vision plan ends May 19, 2019. This is a year-long process of reach out and planning.”

Zermeño states, “It’s the City Council that decides what improvements will be made after this year-long process. It’s a matter of where the needs are, based on talking to the business owners and the residents.”