The retirement of longtime professor and board member Peter Haslund has opened a seat on the Santa Barbara City College Board of Trustees.
Charlotte Gullap-Moore is running for the Area 1 District seat and she explains her candidacy in this Santa Barbara Talks podcast with Josh Molina.
She said she will make diversity a focus if elected.
“If you go somewhere and you don’t see anyone who looks like you, are you really going to feel truly welcome?” Gullap-Moore says in the podcast.
Gullap-Moore says it takes several approaches to helping students of color feel included at colleges, including access to counselors, diversity in the teachers they see in the classroom, access and assistance with financial aid, and overall support. She said she would like to boost collaboration with local businesses.
“We need to show our students, with strong comprehensive community collaboration, that we will set up job opportunities, paid job opportunities, so our students can work part-time and go to school part-time,” Gullap-Moore said.
Some of her goals are to improve the student retention rate and improve the completion rate for students looking to transfer to four-year universities.
Gullap-Moore also shares a story about how her grandmother, a nurse, inspired her to become a nurse. She used to watch her so hard, and remembers that she looked like an angel in her white nursing outfit.
“She was just this strong woman to me, and I was like, ‘I want to be like my grandmother and be a nurse,’” Gullap-Moore said.
Gullap-Moore is also product of the community college system. In this podcast she talks about her mentors and explains how a community college rescued her education. At a community college she found her network of support that she didn’t have in high school, and those mentors propelled her education.
“Sometimes when you are in a situation when no one looks like you, you have to actively go out and seek out your community of supporters,” she said. “The community college empowered me to do that.”
Gullap-Moore and Debi Stoker are running for the Area 1 SBCC Board of Trustees seat in the Nov. 8 election.
Consider a contribution to this podcast by clicking here. Josh Molina has been a journalist in Santa Barbara for 20 years. He also covered City Hall for the San Jose Mercury News. In addition to working as a reporter at Noozhawk, he teaches journalism at Cal State University, Northridge and Santa Barbara City College. Please subscribe to his YouTube channel for more content.