“I go to class early and I’ll sit down, and then everyone else will sit down around me — but never next to me.”
What 55 Black students told us about thriving, and the blueprint they've already drawn for this campus.
Last fall, we asked 55 Black students at Cal State LA what thriving actually looks like. Keep scrolling. Watch the room fill.
Every portrait, every quote, and every count in this piece was gathered by student creators. Not consultants parachuted onto campus. Peers. That’s the method, and it’s also the finding.
Second-year Business Marketing major, Pan-African Studies minor, from Long Beach. Board member of the Black Creative Collective, active in the Black Student Union. Practice spans photography, fashion design, music production, and event planning, built on uplifting the next generation of Black artists and youth creatives.
Third-year Political Science major, born and raised in Los Angeles. Served as Vice President of the Black Student Union, March 2025 – January 2026. An accomplished oil painter, dedicated to cultivating communities where students feel connected, empowered, and fully engaged.
So when Amani and Chanel asked, students answered. You've seen the fist, the smile, the guitar in the Golden Eagle. Here is what they carry.
“We’ve had trouble with other floors … they would see a study room full of Black people and they would just be like ‘oh, they’re hogging the study room’ because they just see a bunch of Black people in a study room.”
F25 interview · verbatim
“I go to class early and I’ll sit down, and then everyone else will sit down around me, but never next to me. … Unless I say something in Spanish, or it’ll come up, and they’re like, ‘oh, I speak Spanish.’”
F25 interview · verbatim · Students navigate both at once.
This complicates the easy story — institution versus students — and replaces it with an honest one. It means thriving can't be delivered by policy alone. It has to be built into the campus culture where students actually learn and live.
So if harm lives in community, why do students keep choosing it?
The work begins here.
Open a door. Each holds the students' own definition, in their own words.
“You should go to CSULA, we’re there and we’re being heard there.”
Through this process I get so many Black students on campus and now I say hi to all of them.
This is paving the road of an understanding of what we need to do to better the life of Black folk here on campus.
A physical pass offering students community + campus-led resources — including mutual aid, curated affinity spaces, creative crisis communications, off-campus safe spaces, faculty programming, and beyond.
Students navigate a paradoxical campus existence: hypervisible and invisible in the same day.
Presence on their own terms. A two-tier consent architecture: required acknowledgments only, everything else opt-in. No surveillance, no spotlight. The pass responds when a student chooses to be seen, never before.
Many harms originate within peer and social circles; policy alone can’t reach them.
Peer-facilitated by design. Programming runs through trained student Architects, the model Amani and Chanel proved, so belonging is built in the spaces where students actually live, by people they already trust.
Community functions as both survival strategy and measure of success, built in informal spaces.
Networks what already exists. The study room, the BSU, the Black Creative Collective: the Breathe Pass connects the sanctuaries students built themselves into one visible, resourced ecosystem, instead of replacing them.
Thriving isn’t one thing: it’s Sanctuary, Excellence, Wellness, and Reciprocity.
Four doors, student’s choice. Breathe Pass programming maps to the four definitions of thriving: a project-based learning session, a wellness invitation, a showcase, a community exchange. Delivered as an invitation, never an assignment.
A student seeking deeper engagement and belonging on campus, building it in informal spaces, without institutional scaffolding.
↓ Meet them thereThey walk past a HEALIX zone, where Black Thriving has happened; the pass recognizes the land, if they’ve opted in.
↓ The pass respondsAn invitation lands: a project-based learning wellness session, by push notification. The informal space and the institution finally meet.
→ Belonging, by designThis isn’t a report to file; it’s a build to commission. Feel To Act has been deployed on four continents; one project it shaped was selected by the United Nations Global Innovation Hub. The infrastructure is proven. The blueprint is drawn. The Working Group’s next move decides whether 55 voices become a campus.
Commission Infinity Village Lab to build the HEALIX Breathe Pass at Cal State LA.
