The Bruin Relief Initiative was created by Adam Tfayli, UCLA Student Body President, in response to the Los Angeles County Fires in January, organizing numerous volunteer events, donation drives on campus and allocating $30,000 from the Undergraduate Students Association Council, or USAC, and the Graduate Students Association, or GSA, toward relief efforts.
“It was started while the wildfires were still happening,” said Tfayli. “We wanted to come up with a comprehensive relief plan for both UCLA. Given that a lot of us are on the ground at UCLA and a lot of us are willing to work and help out, but a lot of students didn’t feel like they had the opportunity to volunteer or help out, even though a lot of them wanted to.”
With the goal of mobilizing the Bruin community to take community action on the fires, Tfayli worked with other USAC members and others in student leadership. The directors of the Bruin Relief Initiative- Tfayli, GSA president- Noor Nakhaei, USAC Student Wellness Commissioner- Chiara Frank, USAC Community Service Commissioner- Carolyn Wang and Charlie Kratus, or @goodmorningUCLA, all managed public relations to make sure people knew how to get involved. Other members of student leadership were involved as well.
“I produced a number of videos from the volunteer experiences,” said Kratus. “I went to Project Angel Food in Downtown LA and then did a video there, you know, great experiences there for four or five hours packaging meals, that would end up going to individuals who are struggling in our community. Then I also did videos of raising donations in front of Target and showing students how they could donate, how they could get involved, and what their resources are going to.”
The organizing of the community service events and donation drives took significant effort on the part of the Community Service Commission and Student Wellness Commission respectively. After partnering with the volunteer center, Wang reached out to a plethora of volunteer agencies and organizations to see where UCLA students could get involved.
“I assembled a team of students from different USAC offices, including my own, and worked with the volunteer center as well,” said Wang. “Kind of like a key theme was that a lot of them were pretty overwhelmed, so they weren’t like ready to ready to host a large group of students yet, we were able to reach out to a few that were willing.”
One of the main hurdles in getting students to the events, with Project Angel Food and LA Regional Food Bank events being far away, was transportation.
“We were able to charter buses through UCLA’s existing like transportation system,” said Wang. “That was really important to us because I personally don’t have a car and know a lot of students don’t have access and ubering is really expensive.”
While volunteer events are done for this quarter, the Community Service Commission would mostly be organizing more opportunities for the spring quarter. “We’re looking to hopefully continue looking for volunteer opportunities related to fire relief that we’ll be able to highlight starting in the spring quarter,” said Wang.
In the meantime, Kratus had some suggestions. “Going to the UCLA Volunteers website is a great way to see how you can get involved and you can go check out the different volunteer opportunities and outside of that, there’s a ton of organizations in LA you can get involved in,” said Kratus. “Even at Luskin [UCLA Luskin Conference Center], there’s a bunch of individuals who are struggling, who are living there, and you can just strike up a conversation with some of them. That’s a meaningful thing to do when they’re struggling so much. I’m also sure that so many UCLA students have friends and family members who lost their houses…and just checking in on them, I think is another easy, inexpensive thing to do.”
Regarding fundraising, all funds came USAC and GSA. “We actually needed way less money than anticipated, and all funding came from USAC and GSA,” said Tfayli. “We all allocated funding toward the initiative, so we didn’t need to do as much fundraising from external sources.”
“I think like for me personally, I actually made it out to the sites and just getting to meet a lot of the students that wanted to help kind of like reaffirmed to me how great the community here is in LA,” said Wang. “During the fires a lot of people were talking on Tiktok and stuff and were laughing at the LA community, saying that the LA community is like very fragmented and like superficial because I think those are just some stereotypes that come with LA.”
Through the Bruin Relief Initiative, Bruin volunteers demonstrated their support and care for the greater Los Angeles community.
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Featured Image via Daily Bruin Archives
