UCSB Student Bees bridges generational gaps through student-led services

UC Santa Barbara’s student-founded service-based organization Student Bees strives to connect older local residents with students, providing a variety of services and forming connections in the community through its work. 

Fourth-year communication major Samai Dhaliwal, third-year biology major Koa Papandrew and UCSB student Zane Pinedo founded Student Bees in February 2026. The organization is an online marketplace agency where Santa Barbara community members can seek assistance for manual labor tasks from student workers, including moving, yard work, furniture assembly and tech support for seniors. 

“We’re basically the matchmakers matching the client to the student that best is able to fulfill their needs,” Papandrew said. 

In October 2025, the founders began developing their ideas into the organization that would eventually become Student Bees. Co-founders Dhaliwal, Papandrew and Pinedo met through the New Venture Program, which is managed by UCSB’s Technology Management program. The program facilitates the creation of entrepreneurial ventures by pitting students against each other in a “Shark Tank”-style competition, where competitors pitch business ideas and have the chance to be rewarded with the funding to develop their startup. 

During a summer spent working in car detailing, Papandrew had met many older clients who appreciated the chance to interact with a younger person, and this experience sparked his idea to create a student-based business that served the older community. Papandrew credited the co-founders’ prior experiences assisting older members of their communities as a key inspiration in their creation of Student Bees.

“The idea stemmed from the fact that we would all kind of help around our neighborhoods, maybe with senior neighbors or our grandparents, and just seeing that there was a need,” Papandrew said. “These people start losing their mobility, they start losing their strength, and a lot of times they just want a helping hand. I think a lot of people reference us as their surrogate grandson or their surrogate son, and that is kind of what we act as. It’s just hands that can help you.”

Dhaliwal worked on developing Student Bees over the past summer, ultimately growing their client base from three to 54.

Student Bees offers student employees hourly wages that outcompete minimum-wage pay in the Santa Barbara area — paying students $25-$30 an hour for their work with the organization. Dhaliwal feels that Student Bees’ lenient, gig-based employment structure will benefit student employees by allowing them to select work times that best fit their schedules.

“Besides the pay, the real opportunity, I always tell them, is that you get to actually meet the network of Santa Barbara,” Dhaliwal said.

He feels that the networking and relationship-building opportunities of the job are some of the most significant benefits that students can gain from working for Student Bees. 

“The number of times people have referred us to other things — I’ve gotten job opportunities in accounting because they’re just so willing to extend it,” Dhaliwal said. “The people I get to meet are amazing. There are so many unique elderly people, and the stories I get to hear are incredible.”

Jill Hyers, the activity director for the Maravilla senior living community in Santa Barbara, was first introduced to Student Bees at an open house event when Dhaliwal approached her with several offers that his organization could assist the seniors at Maravilla, such as technology help and tips on avoiding scams. 

With over 400 senior residents at Maravilla attempting to use technological devices to complete everyday tasks, she said it is very helpful for residents to have access to regular assistance with any technological issues that they may face. 

“It was just a blessing and a gift from God, really,” Hyers said.

“We all get together, the residents in their walkers and their wheelchairs with their iPads, anything that they’ve got. The Bees are there to really make everything comfortable for them and show on a screen what is going on, make it very easy for them to understand and just be on call for any emergency issues,” Hyers said. “They’ve just been amazing. It’s like having a grandson at your community that you live at.”

Hyers said that one of the benefits of having Student Bees work with residents is that Student Bees workers are willing to help with tasks that may feel too small to hire other assistance to complete. 

“We have people coming into our office in our buildings every day, or every other day, asking, ‘When are those Bees guys coming again? I wanted to talk to them. I wanted to ask them something,’” Hyers said. “You don’t realize how important it is until you just sit down with them, and they come to trust them very quickly. It’s a great community service.”

Senior and local resident Leah Diamond first heard about Student Bees through an advertisement on the neighborhood networking app Nextdoor and has since developed a deeper relationship with Dhaliwal through her use of Student Bees’ services.

“[Dhaliwal] helped me on my phone; I write poetry and then turn it into a song, and then a friend of mine does the music, but it wasn’t really clear how to put it on my phone to save the songs, so one of the things he helped me with was how to do that,” Diamond said. “I’m not tech-savvy at all, so I don’t really want to learn. I want to learn as little as I need to to be able to do stuff, so it’s like I know I can call [Dhaliwal] if I have a tech problem.”

Beyond technology help, Diamond believes that she and Dhaliwal have benefited from the connection that Student Bees has facilitated between them.

“I feel like [Dhaliwal] and I have other common interests besides him just coming and doing something for me,” she said. “I make dark chocolate, and whenever he comes, I’ve given him one and we talk about different things, and it’s kind of like having a son or something sometimes. He was having some issues with what he was going to do as a business, and I’ve had a business here for 25 years, so I told him I’d help him, that he could run ideas off of me, and he has done some of that. I feel like I’m kind of a senior mentor to him.”

Britt Iliff, a resident of Santa Barbara’s Garden Court retirement community on De La Vina Street, was Student Bees’ first client. Iliff said that she chose to use Student Bees’ services because she felt the workers seemed trustworthy, energetic and capable of assisting her with tasks that other means of assistance could not accomplish as well. 

“I think the fact that they’re affiliated with UCSB, which legitimizes their presence being here in Santa Barbara, makes it, let’s put it this way: not a scary idea to call a number out of the blue and not know who you’re getting,” Iliff said. “You have a sense of security because they have been validated as being actual students who are looking for part-time work and specializing with this in the senior community. It’s a rare area.” 

Iliff shared a story about struggling to see while driving; she had initially misattributed this struggle to issues with her eyesight. However, Papandrew helped her recognize and address an issue with her headlights that caused the problem. With Papandrew’s assistance, Iliff was able to avoid paying $2000 at a mechanic shop and instead paid him $120 to fix the headlight. 

“He made them like new, and so when I went to drive that week at night, I found that the stripes on the roads were back again,” Iliff said. “It was a simple job, but it changed my night driving completely.”

She values Student Bees’ willingness to work with older people, and their kind personalities in general.

“We put them through the paces,” she said. “It’s not easy working with people who can’t hear you. They’re going, ‘What?’, and you have to yell at them, and it’s really hard. They’ve been so kind and patient, they’ve really been very sweet.”

Iliff appreciates the accessible help that Student Bees offers, comparing their assistance to that of a partner or family member who might stop by casually to complete a small task.

“It’s just the simple, small stuff of running a home. And when you’re alone and you don’t have a partner to help you with that, you can call on [Student Bees], and they just make up that niche that’s really quite good of helping the older generation getting help as they would, for instance, from a family member that lived close by,” she said. “These people have put themselves out there to say that they’re willing to help with the smallest task that we older people really need to have help with over time.”

Hyers shared her appreciation for the enthusiasm and commitment of the Student Bees workers; it’s rare and valuable, she said, for people to be consistently committed to working with residents and building relationships with them over time.

“It’s not just the seniors that get the rewards, it’s the Bees, because they get all the information and all the stories and all the scenarios that the residents share when they feel like they have a trust thing going on,” Hyers said. “I’m just glad that we can say that this generation is just as good as any other generation because you just see it. If you’re willing to look for it, it’s there. And one of those places is the Bees.” 

A version of this article appeared on p. 1 of the Nov. 5 print edition of the Daily Nexus.