Campus Native Plant Gardens Support Biodiversity

City College’s Peer-led Program Builds a Family Atmosphere For Students

Susan Mullaney popcorn@gmail.com

LLed by Ecology instructor Joe Cannon, members of the Sustainability Committee are refreshing the native plant gardens outside the Science building, opposite Cloud Hall on the Ocean campus. Visitors to the gardens may include local native bees, birds, and you, dear reader.

A message of hope is that planting local native plants on public and private property will support sharply declining populations of environment-friendly native bees, butterflies and birds. Birds because they eat insects for protein and insects depend on the plants they co-evolved with.

Volunteer members of the California Native Plant Society’s Yerba Buena Chapter of San Francisco provided indigenous San Francisco plants and seeds for refreshing the gardens. Included are Franciscan wallflowers, or Erysimum franciscanum. This is a significant species as its blossoms are cream colored, while everywhere else in California blossoms are yellow.

Marks, a former trustee, to plant native plants and to remove invasive plants.

It is only in more recent years that the significance of this principle has started to become more widely understood. Scientists now talk about the sixth mass extinction, the biodiversity crisis, the insect apocalypse, and the like. Major threats to biodiversity are habitat destruction/, degradation/fragmentation, invasive species and climate disruption.

Plants are the bases of entire food webs and ecosystems; to re-create habitat for wildlife, we need to plant local native plants.

By: Logan Dang logandang123@gmail.com

At City College, students expand their knowledge of particular fields of interest, but there are various obstacles that students encounter when pursuing their goals. To tackle the issues that students may have and encourage them to be an active member of the school community, the Students Supporting Students program (S Cube) was developed. The coordinator of the program, Andrew Vai, is thankful to the former coordinator who mentored him during his time as a student.

In response to the current support the program is receiving, Vai said, “My time is limited here along with our student mentors. I could be mentoring a student and then 10 students can walk in. We could use more staff members to provide a better time for students.”

One of the missions at S Cube is to “increase the transfer rates of students to four-year universities and to empower marginalized students and communities on campus,” said Vai. S Cube offers a number of services - peer mentoring, providing advice for transfer, financial assistance, and opportunities for community involvement.

Students also go on field trips to connect with their communities. However, with the recent pandemic, activities were limited. “We call it community crawling, representatives from nonprofits that work with specific communities in the neighborhood would lead a tour,” said Vai. These trips included a Filipino-based support center called the Bayanihan Equity Center, and a trip to Manzanar, a former Japanese internment camp.

S Cube also helps organize and is an advocate for social justice and student equity. As mentioned on City College’s page for student services, S Cube activities include “marches to Sacramento to demand funding for schools, not prisons, student walk-outs to fight tuition increases, and advocate for Ethnic Studies and culturally relevant student services.” scarce for birds. It's a terrific alternative to invasive ornamentals like the red-berry-bearing cotoneaster around the campus.

"Native plants help sustain San Francisco's biodiversity, require less water, and provide more ecosystem benefits than ornamentals. Milton [Marks] and I saw native plants as an important component of City College's sustainability efforts," said Trustee Rizzo.

Native plant gardens are in keeping with the Sustainability Plan approved by the Board of Trustees in 1998. The plan includes a major principle promulgated by former trustee John Rizzo and the late Milton

The Sustainability Committee is under the purview of the Academic Senate. Meetings, agendas and minutes are posted on the CCSF Academic Senate website All CCSF community members are welcome to participate with this volunteer group headed by co-chairs Joe Cannon and counselor Anastasia Fiandaca.

S Cube also provides an area for study, containing computers, printers, and mentors. Student worker, Irish Gwyneth Villanueva, majoring in psychology, said she values Vai for helping her navigate the resources provided and allocating those resources to students who need them. Irish’s activities include helping students register for classes, as well as picking their schedules and teachers, and any other questions students may have. “It’s really important that I get to help other students, not just in academics, but in also how they excel here,” said Irish.

The space S Cube provides is also a hang-out spot for students. “People of all different backgrounds come here to chat amongst each other, serving as a space for students to be themselves,” Said Henry Drake, a student at City College.

S Cube also arranges students with various workshops, personal statement writeups, how to write a resume, and how to write a cover letter, among others.

How do members feel about the program? Student Richard Chu along with Villanueva and Drake all agreed that the program feels like a family. It’s a place where “we hang out and relax, but also make connections,” said Chu. The morale students have built for each other speaks for itself as they have more confidence in their studies and know they have support from others.

S Cube works with City College’s culinary program, “We were able to pass out free lunches through the window during and after the pandemic, now on Monday’s and Wednesday’s,” said Vai. “I wasn’t academically driven. I would rather do other things, but S Cube didn’t pressure me about academics. Just doing one class here and there and over time, I started to realize the importance of it and it helped me help other students. They understood that it takes steps for a student to grow into something better,” said Drake. The program’s biggest asset is “networking and so the backbone of S Cube is the student experience,” he added.

If you want to be a part of S Cube, visit City College’s webpage regarding student services or visit the Student Union Building, room 203.