SAN DIEGOSAN DIEGO — UC San Diego student Arianna Chávez has spent the last two years connecting residents across San Diego with information about housing, food and COVID-19 health resources using eye-catching videos and pictures on Instagram.
Chávez started the Instagram San Diego Free Resources or @bastaladisparidad, which in Spanish means “put an end to disparity,” to share information about resources provided by nonprofit groups, schools and local governments.
She hopes to address what she saw as a disconnect between available resources and people’s knowledge or access to them.
“I would never have imagined that there are as many resources in San Diego County,” Chávez said. “I think that some people don’t know about it, so that’s why my page is so important.”
The ’s followers have grown from a few hundred when she started it in 2019 to almost 7,000 in recent months. The Instagram page had 25,000 page visits in May, she said.
She attributes the growth to residents who share her posts with their followers. Chávez plans to continue expanding into other social media platforms, to target young adults, because not enough organizations target them for services, she said.
Some of her posts raise awareness about “period poverty,” referring to an inability to access menstrual products, while others list food distribution locations and scholarship programs for high school and college students.
Food and housing are challenges for many students.
Surveys at community colleges and four-year universities across the country have found at least 45 percent of students experience limited or uncertain access to food. And a 2019 survey by the nonprofit Hope Center for College, Community, and Justice found that 56 percent of students in higher education are housing insecure.
About 10 percent of San Diego’s homeless population — or 223 people — are youth under the age of 24, according to the 2020 annual count by San Diego Regional Task Force on the Homeless.
Chávez grew up in the South Bay and was moved by the stories of people who needed help, she said.
The 22-year-old biology senior at UC San Diego spends about 20 hours a week collecting resources and deg posts for the Instagram page. The posts range from colorful text images with a couple of sentences about a free program or service, to videos explaining how residents can get free ission to museums, ride public transit for free and get immunized.
Chávez focuses on resources that could benefit communities of color in the South Bay and some North County cities with large populations of Latinos.
“The big thing is to minimize health disparities,” Chávez said. “Everything that I post in some way is tied to health.”
Last year Chávez started an unpaid internship program for high school and college students who want to contribute to the page. Each intern focuses on a health topic and does research on free resources available.
Intern Halelujah Temesgen , a global health major at UCSD, recently has highlighted information from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and has been debunking false claims about the Johnson & Jonson vaccine.
Intern Sofía Arrizón, a neuroscience student at UC Riverside who grew up in Chula Vista, said the page is going to continue growing, and she hopes others will be inspired to start something similar in their counties.
“Basta la Disparidad is an asset for our community,” she said.
