New role brings more focus to student basic needs

After struggling as an undergraduate at University of California, Irvine, Andrea Mora is now the school's director of basic needs and tasked with supervising various services that the university provides to students whose backgrounds and life stories are much like her own: students from low-income or immigrant backgrounds; first in their families to attend college; Black, Hispanic or Indigenous, or BIPOC. Mora's position is slowly becoming more common, as colleges and universities invest in hiring directors of basic needs to address growing food and housing insecurity among students.