Finding Community

Student organizations have been integral to the culture of UC Santa Cruz since its earliest days as an institution. With about 200 student organizations registered and many more unofficial groups, the question is not if there is a space for you on campus, but which space is right for you.
Over the summer, City on a Hill Press interviewed a variety of student leaders from across campus spaces to document their experiences. This arrangement of interviews does not cover the full scope of organizations available, and there are students who bring the same passion to their organizations in every space on campus. The stories told in this article have been edited for clarity and readability.
SOMeCA is the student-staff collective that houses most organizations and supports spaces through leadership training, mentorship, and organizational advising. The Big 5 Ethnic Organizations — The Black Student Union, Asian/Pacific Islander Student Alliance, Student Alliance of Native Americans & Indigenous Peoples, Bayanihan, and Movimiento Estudiantil ChicanX de Aztlán — serve their respective underrepresented groups.

Kendra Corbray

“Community for BSU really just means creating a space where Black students can exist fully and authentically. It’s all about nurturing that sense of belonging. [When] I joined the organization, I didn’t really understand the terrain of our campus too much, and [BSU] was an opportunity for me to integrate myself into university life. I was able to really participate in building this space because there’s an educational piece to this as well. There’s this building of critical consciousness, where we can share our stories and celebrate our culture, but there’s something really unique about sustaining our work and using our history to inform the ways that we decide to show up on campus today. [BSU and other ethnic organizations] have nurtured this idea of critical consciousness, this idea of community that really challenges what we think of capitalism and hierarchies. When we talk about ethnic organizations and affinity spaces, I feel like they’re established to create safe spaces, and I’m interested in moving beyond a safe space to be a brave space. There’s an African proverb that describes it well, ‘I am because we are, and since we are, therefore I am.’”

Camila Alvarez

“I joined the team my first year, back in 2022, and honestly, I was just trying to find a space on campus like any first-year would. The [performance] directors I had at the time were honestly the best people I could ever train under. They made a super sweet, welcoming environment. We are an unaffiliated school organization, which is a blessing and sometimes not so much of a blessing, but honestly, we make do with what we can, and I honestly think we’ve been doing really well. We have contemporary dancers, we have breakers, we have people who did ballet, we have people with all sorts of backgrounds. I feel like I’ve been able to pick out different styles and find which one suits me. The values of community and family, which I would say is the core of our team, follow me wherever I go. It’s a feeling and a reassurance that I take with me. It’s been super exciting to see how I’ve grown these past three years — I honestly don’t know what I would do now without dance.”

Kyle Vergara

“I didn’t intend to join Bayanihan. I came here to do what I thought was a typical college experience, just live in the dorms and get a degree — not join a bunch of clubs. I just happened to join an acapella group because there was some-one singing karaoke at Cornucopia and it ended up being Isang Himig, which is Bayanihan’s acapella group. Then the mentorship program of Bayanihan rolled around for that year, and the coordinator of the group said: ‘Kyle, you’re signing up.’ And I was like: ‘I’m fine in my own little bubble, but I’ll give it a try I guess.’ Everybody made me feel at home in this space — now I want to make other people feel at home when they come in because this space doesn’t keep itself going. People have to want to step up. Being involved with Bayanihan leadership has given me a lot of opportunities I wouldn’t have had otherwise. I’ve gotten to connect with people who come from a bunch of different walks of life. [Bayanihan is] about embodying that spirit of ‘anybody’s welcome in this family,’ and it’s making sure that people have a safe space to come back to when they’re dealing with all the scary shit that happens in college.”

Elsie Vizcarra

“Student agency and empowerment are two core things at e2. I had never been a part of a space like that. I felt like, if I join e2 and I have questions about my classes or I have questions about campus, I have people I can ask that aren’t gonna judge me — because they were in my position a couple of years ago. Through their mentorship and the community that I was able to build, I decided that this was the work that I wanted to keep doing while I was here. I really do believe in the mission of e2 — to keep students of color on campus. That’s why I think people keep staying — you’re not being told what to do, especially by our staff. It’s us figuring it out and taking that initiative. If you have a problem on campus or you have something that you’re just not okay with, this is the space to talk about it and see what we can do about it. The important thing is trusting yourself and knowing that you deserve to be on this campus, you deserve to find a community.”

Andreu Ariciaga

“I’m not from [Santa Cruz] so I didn’t really have the means to go back home very often. I started looking for community on campus and there was this darkroom class I heard everyone wanted to take. At that point, I’d only shot a couple of rolls, and quickly it became [my] first experience of meeting people working at different experience levels. In the darkroom, you have people here as early as 6 a.m. to as late as 3 a.m. — and I’ve done both. We have to shout out Jack Chapman. He’s the instructor here, and he operates this darkroom. He teaches everybody the importance of being in a space like this. [My first print], it came out perfect — the borders were good, and the print quality was nice — and I remember showing that to Jack and him being like: ‘That’s a great print. What are you going to do next?’ [This space] allowed me to have the least distractions possible. I recently got sober before I came to school and I was worried about that — the first time you go to college, you want to go to parties, bars and clubs and all those things. And that worried me because, you know, I didn’t want to take my education for granted. So when I had all this free time, it was a means of: ‘All right, what can I do?’ And photography quickly became that thing.”

Millie Hacker

“I saw a Fruitcake Discord on a Reddit post and started going to the meetings — it was on Zoom at the time — but it was still pretty fun. We were doing random art activities that you can do synchronously but online. We would get together in groups in person, try to make something happen, and then show off what our group accomplished. I like that style of collaborative artwork, so I wanted to get more involved. I’ve always been into art as a hobby, not in any formal capacity, I’ve never taken an [art] class. I remember I was very insecure about what I drew, wrote, and said — but everyone was super, super nice about what other people were producing and always giving constructive feedback. I think the structure of [Student Media] is important in terms of being able to get funding to execute these projects and put out print publications — none of that would have been possible without [SOMeCA]. It’s made me feel more secure in moving through adulthood and given me the confidence to find more community. Knowing how many people there are having these shared interests in art and producing visually interesting things gives enough of a shared foundation that we can all get along, even if we’re very different people.”

Nazeerah Rashad

“CAD has a unique approach to welcoming new people, especially freshmen, because we always want to get younger people involved so they can stick around and keep the message going. I had a mentor through the Black Academy Program who introduced me to SOMeCA. He recommended that if I was really looking for community, especially in my freshman year, I get in contact with a couple of other students who were active in organizations, and the [organization] that stuck out to me was CAD because of my experience growing up with performing arts. Being in student organizations during your time here cultivates a part of you that I feel most people don’t have until they get to college, or at least they don’t get the opportunity to explore that until they are given a platform to practice student agency. I think being given that platform does a lot for people, not only in the way that you perform academically in college, but how you carry yourself. [It] gives you the confidence to explore different things that you wouldn’t have done otherwise. If I didn’t get involved in AATAT during my freshman year, I probably wouldn’t have stayed [at UCSC]. I felt like there wasn’t enough community for me here until I found CAD. The experiences that I’ve had, being able to meet these people and interact with them and share parts of my life with them, has made my life so much more rich.”