Homeless but Not Voiceless in College
This guest blog is authored by Clare Cady, Director of Community Engagement at the forthcoming HOPE Center for College, Community, and Justice and co-founder of the College and University Food Bank Alliance. Find her on twitter at @clarecady .
“Get to know all these people because they’ll to help us too. They’ve been there. Ok, they’ve been there when you haven’t. Even though I know you want to help, and you have the heart. You’ve got a backbone here of people that have experienced this. Don’t waste that at all.”
– Justice Butler, acknowledging all persons who chose to stand and share that they were homeless at the #RealCollege Convening on October 23 in Philadelphia.
So often we do things about the students without them. I get it. Students are busy. They are in class, working, studying, and trying to do life. And homeless and hungry students are even busier. They work more and are dealing with all of the challenges each day throws at them. It can be so much simpler to do my work, study their lives, and create programs to support their success. I don’t have to add anything more to their plates, and If I can do this I will make their lives better, I just know it.
These are all thoughts I am guilty of.
It’s easy to get into the mindset that we can design and implement programming to support student success without including them in the process. After all, as student affairs practitioners we do it every day. And we were taught to. If you were like me and you went through an education leadership graduate program you read studies done on students, learned about approaches to their development, and read up on current trends in serving them. I can’t recall in any one of the readings or conversations from my masters program ever engaging with material where the students being studied or served actively informed the process. For a field that prides itself in being student-centered that’s a pretty problematic approach.
This year at the #RealCollege Convening in Philadelphia we sought to bring students to the core of the event and to the work we are rolling out at Temple. In particular we heard from two extraordinary women, Mary Baxter and Justice Butler. Butler provided the crowd with a powerful spoken word performance, and then sat center seat in a session on student homelessness. During the panel Butler asked persons in the crowd who had experienced homelessness to stand. Between 30 and 40 people rose. Butler stated “Get to know all these people because they’ll to help us too. They’ve been there. Ok, they’ve been there when you haven’t. Even though I know you want to help, and you have the heart. You’ve got a backbone here of people that have experienced this. Don’t waste that at all.”
Her words could not have been more apt for us on college campuses — we have a backbone of students ready to share their experiences and make suggestions on how to improve their lives. Butler’s school, Houston Community College, is living this approach as they serve students through a food scholarship program. Butler works on the program, is a recipient of the scholarship, and is its primary spokesperson. Including students in this way is critical to all programs, and service to students experiencing hunger and homelessness is no different. I’d argue it may be one of the most critical places to have student input and action. Students experiencing these issues feel alone, and knowing that others are experiencing it too can make a huge difference. Also, a peer to peer approach can make it seem like the services are more accessible and less stigmatized.
And students are not too busy to engage in work that will improve their lives and the lives of their peers. Students step up in big ways when they are able to use their skills and talents. Mary Baxter, an artist who is also a homeless and a student at the Community College of Philadelphia, directed a video sharing her life of couch surfing with her son. Her action and activism call attention to her experience and the experiences of students like her. Hunger and homelessness among students, a largely invisible issue on college campuses, comes to light when students like Mary and Justice get involved.
What does this mean as practitioners? It means stepping back from the sense that we are going to be the saviors and places us as partners in action with those we are hoping to save. We cannot turn the hunger and homelessness crisis on our campuses into another area in which we treat students like lab rats to be studied, but instead should bring them in to the design and implementation of research. We must involve students in the creation of the programs meant to serve them so they are safe, effective, and well-utilized. The students can and will step up. We just need to step out of the way.
