A behind-the-scenes look at crewmembers responsible for UC Davis grounds, landscapes

A bike ride from Shields Library to Hunt Hall is not too far in distance, but the breadth of natural beauty along the way seems endless. Massive oaks and vibrant lawns line the bike path, and not just on this particular journey, but all over campus.

UC Davis is known for the cozy comfort evoked by the presence of such well-kept nature on its campus, a characteristic feature of the university despite it being the largest UC campus by acreage. And it’s the people behind the scenes who we can thank for that: UC Davis Grounds and Landscape Services.

“We’re at 62 [workers] currently as we speak,” said Tyson Mantor, the grounds superintendent. “We are responsible for the landscaped areas on campus and some outlying country areas. It comes up to upwards of 700 acres on the central bit of campus that are landscaped and highly maintained, but to include the other sites around campus, it comes out to about 1,000 acres that we maintain. It’s a lot of space, and with the number of employees I just listed, it’s kind of remarkable.”

As a Davis alumnus, Mantor has seen the grounds crew blossom into one of the most successful in the landscape industry since he joined after his graduation. Since it began in the 1940s, the landscape department has seen a number of positive changes that have allowed it to become an exemplary leader of landscape management across the state — even the nation.

“This [year] is now the second time we’ve got a four-star accreditation with the Professional Grounds Management Society,” said Matt Forrest, a grounds supervisor who has worked on campus for nearly 30 years. “We were the first one to get it, so it’s an honor to be a part of that.”

Although there’s no official mission statement for sustainability measures, Mantor points out that sustainability is pushed culturally throughout the department and the school. The department has largely switched to utilizing compost on campus grounds, as well as using organic fertilizers and fungicides, subsequently reducing synthetic inputs by about 75 percent over the last three years alone.

“We know that we’re looked at as an example in the industry for sports turf, landscape maintenance [and] irrigation management, so we feel very happy to be a part of that,” Forrest said. “We try to bring our level up to a very high professional level, not only technically, but also [by] being open minded and better about our sustainability practices.”

The grounds crew is not only responsible for spaces popularly occupied by students, such as the Quad, but also for the athletic fields. Now that UC Davis is a Division I school, Kore Higuchi, Davis’ sports turf manager, is tasked with meeting the high demand of keeping these landscapes up to par.

“My crew [is] responsible for roughly 78 acres on campus between all the campus [recreation], intramural clubs and athletics,” Higuchi said. “With the drought we went through, I was challenged with trying to meet reductions in water. With that [we] took the opportunity to assess the conditions on all of our fields, and tried to reduce the amount of synthetic inputs [such as] the fertilizers, the fungicides [and] the chemical-type things.”

According to Higuchi, every day is a new challenge. Expanded student enrollment over the past few years has increased demands on all aspects of the job. Nonetheless, Higuchi is the best man for the job, having an appreciation and understanding for the problem-solving required in his work, especially in light of Davis’ upward climb in the realm of sports success.

“You know you watch professional sporting events and everybody watches the players, but if I turn the TV on I’m looking at everybody else’s field, knowing the amount of work that goes into doing that,” Higuchi said. “It is a huge part of that small piece that enables others to do what they do well, that’s what I really enjoy.”

Something Higuchi, Mantor and Forrest all have in common is a desire to do stimulating work in such a great environment that is also visually beautiful, and that is something they experience here at UC Davis.

“I get satisfaction out of doing work with my hands and getting things done,” Forrest said. “Our jobs change every day, hour by hour, we have to react to different conditions. So I think I enjoy the challenge but also realize that we get to work in a pretty darn nice environment, in a park-like setting in a community of a campus that is proactive. Being part of that campus in all that we do is a benefit for me personally, and I hope that I can share my gifts and my benefits and help the campus too.”

The draw for many students and employees to this campus is its stunning landscape, one that seems so perfectly natural to this historic little town, but takes a great deal of effort and hard work to maintain.

There’s a lot to be proud of as Aggies, but there is always room to appreciate even more those who work so hard to maintain this beautiful living space.

“If your first impression when you walk onto a campus, whether you be a potential student or you be a potential faculty member that they’re trying to recruit, if [ the grounds crew] can make that first impression for potential customers, that’s huge,” Mantor said. “If we can be that draw, be that reason why people come here, you can’t do much better than that.”

Written by: Marlys Jeane — features@theaggie.org

Fighting transgender community stigma with JVMC, healthcare, hormone therapy at GHC

Social stigma can take a toll on lives — sometimes quite literally.

“Joan Viteri Memorial Clinic (JVMC), as its name implies, [was] founded in memory of Joan Viteri,” said Noreen Mansuri, a fourth-year NPB major and the co-director of JVMC. “She was a community member [of] Oak Park (a neighborhood in Sacramento) who died due to a treatable abscess. She passed away due to the stigma she received as [did other] people in her community who [used] intravenous drugs.”

Essentially, Joan Viteri died from an infection that was treatable, but lost her life due to social stigma against intravenous drug users that prevented her from seeking medical care. She was afraid of the judgement she’d receive from the medical community.

“JVMC was founded to prevent any deaths of that nature from happening again,” Mansuri said. “Right now we provide resources and primary healthcare to all Oak Park community members, but we have specific resources to treat individuals who use intravenous drugs, individuals who work in the sex trade and trans folk. Those are our three target populations.”

JVMC, which is located in Sacramento and run by UC Davis School of Medicine students, sends some of its volunteers to help at a nonprofit organization called the Gender Health Center (GHC), also located in Sacramento. The GHC is a resource for members of the LGBTQIA population seeking counseling and therapy services. It also provides people in transition with hormone therapy services. The members of these organizations strive to provide much more than medical services, trying to create a safe space for community members and patients.  

“We work with harm reduction services where they help provide resources for those who use intravenous drugs and [address other circumstances] that could be prevented by using harm reduction,” said Maddy Silverstein, a fourth-year biological sciences major and JVMC’s other co-director.

Harm reduction aims to reduce risk in a patient’s life by preventing an escalation of a condition or remediating it.

“Harm reduction is the idea, specifically in the context of drug use, [that is] about meeting the person where they are at and working with them on their personal goals and their vision for their health,” Mansuri said. “And that can build up to abstinence or it could not. It’s about minimizing risk.”

GHC provides many services to the LGBTQIA community, catering to social and psychological needs as well as medical and legal help. Many people drive to GHC for two to three hours to come to a place where they can feel safe and welcomed.

“Our doctors are willing — the emphasis placed on the willing – to prescribe hormones,” Mansuri said. “There’s not a great deal of education that goes on in medical curriculum about hormone therapy and it’s not that there’s a huge science behind it or anything, it’s the same hormones we’re familiar with [such as] testosterone and estrogen, and you just have to figure out the dose that’s appropriate for the particular person. There’s a lot of resistance and uncertainty because it’s not really familiar to a lot of people — they weren’t trained to do it. So there’s this kind of fear almost.”

Hormone therapy is described on the National Center for Biotechnology Information’s website as a treatment sought by “transgender men and women […] as part of the transition process. Exogenous testosterone is used in transgender men to induce virilization and suppress feminizing characteristics. In transgender women, exogenous estrogen is used to help feminize patients.”

Mansuri emphasized the importance of educating the next generation of medical practitioners, as these organizations are doing, on the needs of various groups of people. Catering to the needs of trans people through hormone therapy is one example of this.

There are also many assumptions about the moral compasses of those that use intravenous drugs.

“A lot of people with other health issues and diseases sometimes start using drugs because [they want to] cope with that,” Silverstein said.

Others have turned to drugs when their biology has failed them.

“You release endorphins, but if a person does not release the right amount of endorphins their baseline is much lower [and] much less happy than a typical person,” Mansuri said. “People who use drugs actually [may be] trying to help themselves, but the effects are pretty detrimental. Working with this population, [and] getting to know them and learning from them [teaches] you that it is not a moral failing.”

Jason Blanks and Danielle Wang are both second-year medical students at the UC Davis School of Medicine and work as JVMC’s coordinators and the GHC’s co-directors. They volunteer at GHC every first and third Friday of the month and assist in providing hormone therapy.

“What we do is just a very small medical side of things,” Blanks said. “We provide hormones [at a] free clinic [and] make sure they get the medications they need, and then we work with social workers and other folks to make sure they’re getting the support that they need.”

Wang mentioned that the hormone clinic has a patient panel of about four hundred. This led her to realize how much of a demand there is for medical aid to the transgender and other underserved communities.

“We did some research last year that basically says that [about] 90 percent of our patients have insurance for a primary care provider,” Blanks said. “So theoretically, 90 percent of our patients shouldn’t be our patients. They have a doctor who sees them for everything except hormones, which is — I guess from a medical perspective— very odd. Hormones aren’t complicated medicine from any stretch of the imagination.”

Written by: Sahiti Vemula — features@theaggie.org