WATSONVILLE — Cabrillo College’s Watsonville Center hosted a grand opening for its new food pantry and wellness center this week. The Watsonville Wellness Center, now home to the Cabrillo Nourishment and Essential Supports Team, or NEST, will serve as a one-stop shop for resources including food, hygiene products and mental health services.
The center takes up almost an entire building on the Watsonville campus. The ground floor is home to a food pantry, as well as a few cooking appliances students can use to prepare the food they get from the pantry. The center also offers diapers and hygiene kits. Upstairs are several offices where students can get connected with resources including mental health services, harm reduction services and student support groups.
It’s a significant upgrade from the former home of the Nourishment and Essential Supports Team, which was a single classroom in an adjacent building. At the old food pantry, students were able to come in and take cans off a shelf, but there was little to no interaction with staff. It made it difficult to connect food insecure students with helpful resources, said Michelle Donohue-Mendoza, Cabrillo’s dean of students. Now, the Watsonville Wellness Center is housed in a much larger space that Cabrillo staff hope will be more welcoming and accessible.
“It’s amazing,” said Kristofer Evans, a Cabrillo student who works on the Nourishment and Essential Supports Team. “It’s a little bit more homey. … It’s a separate spot for the students.”
The new Wellness Center and Food Pantry on Cabrillo’s Watsonville campus aims to connect students with resources including food and hygiene products. (Caroline Hemphill — Santa Cruz Sentinel)
The building also has an office for community partners. Right now, Second Harvest Food Bank occupies the office, and Salud Para La Gente is expected to move in soon. Second Harvest representatives will help Cabrillo students with CalFresh applications and other food resources, including healthy food deliveries for students with health conditions. Second Harvest also provides food for twice monthly distributions at both the Aptos and Watsonville campuses. The leftovers from those distribution events are stocked in the food pantry.
Before the Wellness Center moved in, the building was home to a few different groups, including a charter school and a technology resource nonprofit called the DigitalNEST. Through a $950,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Education, Cabrillo was able to transition the space, purchasing equipment and furniture as well as painting and cleaning the building.
“It’s a relief,” Donohue-Mendoza said. “To be awarded, it just felt wonderful, because there wasn’t anything here in Watsonville and that didn’t feel right for me in terms of equity and accessibility.”
At the grand opening event Monday, community members were able to tour the new facility. They also watched a live “Chefs in the NEST” demonstration, during which two Cabrillo students used ingredients from the food pantry — including canned beans and chicken — to make tostadas for the crowd. Such demonstrations have been a part of the Nourishment and Essential Supports Team for a while, and will continue in the new center.
The goal of the demonstrations is to show people how they can use food pantry ingredients to make nutritious food, and to destigmatize canned foods. Evans, who helped put on the demonstration Monday afternoon, came up with the idea. He said that after he started working on the Nourishment and Essential Supports Team, he noticed that the old food pantry wasn’t seeing much traffic.
Cabrillo College President Jenn Capps, Dean of Students Michelle Donohue-Mendoza and the school’s Board of Trustees cut the ribbon outside of the new wellness center Monday afternoon. (Caroline Hemphill — Santa Cruz Sentinel)
Evans wanted to find ways to make the food pantry’s goods more appealing. The Cabrillo student said he was raised on canned food himself, and because one of his three majors is in culinary arts, he felt he was in a good position to show other students how they could use food pantry items to make satisfying meals. Evans even wrote a grant, securing funds from the Cabrillo College Foundation for kitchen equipment.
Now, the Nourishment and Essential Supports Team has moved into a much bigger space, along with dedicated office spaces for other wellness services. Cabrillo students and staff believe the change will make a big difference, and make students feel more comfortable seeking out basic needs resources.
“I think we’re serving our community better,” Donohue-Mendoza said.