This week I focused on readings that evaluate the key elements of reducing and solving hunger on college campuses, report on current projects working to address hunger among students and pitch potential solutions and limitations. These readings included research papers, news articles, and university publications that I plan to use heavily when I create my final document in week 5. I will also be making connections to “Landscapes as living laboratories for sustainable campus planning and stewardship: A scoping review of approaches and Practices” by Trinity Gomez and Victoria Derr. I read Gomez and Derrs’ research paper for my ILC with Anthony Levenda, and in combination with another paper I read this week and a quote from Jenea Cohn it helps me best articulate not only the parallels between food access and access to learning via digital reading, but the ways in which they intersect and their needs coexist.
My first reading was “Food Insecurity at Urban Universities: Perspectives During the COVID-19 Pandemic”, a research paper co-published by the Coalition of Urban Serving Universities and the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities. I picked this paper for its in-depth evaluation of the research collected and its relevance to Evergreen as a primarily commuter campus located in a city. They also highlighted the University of Washington Tacoma as one of the project sites they worked with, and the physical closeness to the data felt like it may provide better inside as to Evergreens options. The research and report was created with six guiding questions as follows:
How do students at urban universities experience food insecurity?
What approaches do universities use to mitigate food insecurity on their campuses and in their
communities?
How has the COVID-19 pandemic changed food insecurity efforts at universities?
How does food insecurity impact student success?
What relationship exists between systemic racism and food insecurity among students?
What future directions or innovations should be explored to address basic needs?
I really liked being able to see the researchers thought processes in these questions and having them available to help guide my reading. As a small note, what would it be like to have the contributors add their own annotations to this paper via hypothes.is?
Research for this paper was done across five universities in the United States, in the form of interviews, focus groups, and surveys, the questions for which were developed by a group of university leaders and allowed for interviewers to pick questions relevant to the stakeholders. The findings were split into two categories, food insecurity, and institutional culture.
Under food insecurity there are four categories, work and finances, belonging, behaviors, and other basic needs. The next few paragraphs will be my thoughts on their description of each category, but I wanted to highlight this quote from the beginning of the section as I found it very impactful when working through their findings.
“It is critical to stress that these domains co-exist within academic and societal contexts. Minoritized students (low-income, students of color, first-generation), as well as adult learners, come to the university often after surmounting incredible barriers to entry. Food insecurity, then, is often embedded in the conceptualization of what it means to be a college student.”
The idea of the “hungry college student” is a common stereotype, but it’s founded in the historical and current reality that unless you are incredibly wealthy you will have to compromise on some of your basic needs while you’re in college. As food prices rise the issue of food insecurity rises with it, but college students are often studying full-time as well as working, there often aren’t any means left to make more money. Even if scholarships and loans are available, will we reach a point where the majority of people won’t be able to support themselves in college, and therefore not go? Specifically looking at the fourth guiding question “How does food insecurity impact student success?”, I would further ask “How does food insecurity impact student success, and how can educational settings support a student’s continued access to food?”. While I will not at all disagree with the need for college-run basic needs services, if academic success is impacted by hunger then it seems like utilizing learning spaces to ensure food security would create a stronger and more self-sustaining social safety net for students.
The behaviors section explores students’ behaviors resulting from food insecurity and hunger. An early quote that highlighted research findings caught my eye, “According to one university, 89% of students surveyed are eating less than they should because they lack sufficient food or money. In addition to reducing food intake, students also indicated that their meal choices often have low nutritional value, with 67% of students reporting that they cannot afford to eat balanced meals either occasionally or often.” When highlighting behaviors staff use to identify students experiencing food insecurity, they mentioned the more obvious signs such as using the food pantry or other campus tangible resources, but also noted that students with declining academic performance or many absences are often in need of support as well, reporting “one student mentioned that when they experience food insecurity, they spend a significant amount of time searching for and accessing other food options, while navigating an unreliable public transportation system, all of which curtails the amount of available study time.”
This brings me back to the earlier quote and my thoughts on challenging food insecurity in the classroom. Immediately my mind goes to edible gardens, community plots, and college farms, all of which are viable options for both educating and feeding students. While edible gardens are often less for food production, both student garden plots and campus farms can produce a decent amount of food when utilized correctly. While “Landscapes as living laboratories for sustainable campus planning and stewardship: A scoping review of approaches and practices” by Trinity Gomez and Victoria Derr early sections highlight the many benefits of integrated living laboratories and edible gardens, listing fruit and vegetable production, varied benefits to local wildlife and vegetation, sustainable energy production, and decreased stress levels for students. However, as much as I support the creation and ongoing work of these programs, I feel like the solution has to be more accessible. Not every student will want to take part in one of these classes, even if they enjoy the benefits they provide to their campus, and that’s to be expected at any college that offers multiple areas of study. I would think the key lies in the implementation of food access support within all learning spaces, and an emphasis for higher education staff to understand the effects of hunger on academic success.
In the work and finances section they highlight another key piece of their findings; “Nationally, 43% of full-time undergraduate students work while enrolled, almost one-third of whom work more than 20 hours a week. Seventy-one percent of part-time students work more than 20 hours a week, the majority of whom work more than 35 hours each week. 10 Students need to work to pay tuition, meet family responsibilities, and buy food. However, universities are still designed for the college student of yesterday: enrolled full-time, financially dependent on their parents, with no significant responsibilities of their own. As a result, students who must work often have to contend with unfriendly policies and structures that do not take into consideration student availability.”
The number of full-time students who work while they’re enrolled is surprisingly low to me, I don’t know many people with the option to not work in some capacity while they’re in school. But it’s true that college is not set up for the student of today. A full-time program is forty hours a week, I am very lucky to get quite a lot of help from my parents paying for school and housing, but I can’t afford to work less than fifteen hours a week to survive, and twenty if I want to have a savings account. I don’t have a plan for when I become an RA and can only work eight, I don’t know if I can realistically take the sixteen credits I plan to, be an RA, and work a regular job off campus. My options for work are limited to things like babysitting and dog walking, and not only are they unreliable but odd jobs such as that are often inaccessible to those with physical disabilities.
Something that really struck me was in the very last paragraph of the section when a staff member said “If they are coming to us, it is because they often have nowhere else to turn.” What drives the distaste for receiving help from the college as opposed to somewhere else? How can we flip that, and make our places of learning accessible and malleable to the students who want to be there?
Other basic needs is exactly as it sounds, examining the non-edible necessities and how accessible they are to the participating college students. Highlighted was transportation as a means of accessing of campus food resources, noting how the lack of access to a car limits a student’s abilities not only to efficiently reach a grocery store or food bank but also their ability to bring food home. They also mentioned how students would put any and all money into finding or keeping housing, often leaving them with nothing left for food. This section is necessary for the overall framework but didn’t give me a whole lot to write about.
The final section for the food insecurity framework is belonging, which they describe as “the perception that one is welcomed, respected, and able to succeed, and that their experiences with food insecurity matter to others on campus (faculty, staff, and other students). They evaluate the sense of belonging in food insecurity from a few angles. The first was a sense of belonging due to the student’s financial situation, and the fear of being seen using these resources and labeled as poor by a peer. This is one I struggled with personally until not too long ago. It was probably around a year ago I began speaking openly about going through phases of food insecurity and being in less-than-ideal financial situations. I strongly believe that it is a personal choice to disclose such things, but progress will only be made if we can have these kinds of conversations. By casually talking about my experiences I hope that other people will see not only that they aren’t alone, but they will feel safer in seeking out the help they need. In an ideal world we could deconstruct the social stigma that comes with financial insecurity to discover what the non-tangible social fears are, where they come from, and change the way we think about access to basic needs in relation to money.
The second way in which they evaluate the sense of belonging is through the food available to students through on-campus programs. Students are well aware of the poor quality and nutritional value of the food that is usually stocked in these pantries, and a quote that hit home for me was “Not wanting to appear ungrateful for the food, students either take the food and re-donate it or, in some cases, reduce usage of the pantry altogether, and try to access food elsewhere. Even in their time of need, maintaining a sense of dignity was important to them.”
I am a frequent user of food pantries, food banks, and the CCBLA on campus. I never want to be ungrateful for free food, I’m there because I couldn’t get it myself, but too often the food I get is expired, damaged, or straight-up gross. There is a stigma that because I do not want to eat these things I am not really food insecure, but as they said, it comes down to dignity. Of course maintaining dignity is important, we are human beings with very little money or assets, and our dignity is one of the few things within our control. This section also notes the cultural and religious needs that are overlooked when stocking these pantries, and included one student’s very sharp quote “Why does the pantry have Italian salad dressing, but not soy sauce?”
It was this section that made me think most of “Landscapes as living laboratories for sustainable campus planning and stewardship: A scoping review of approaches and practices” by Trinity Gomez and Victoria Derr. One of the key themes of their paper was the social sustainability of these living laboratories (which is a key issue I am working to solve within Evergreens sustainability programs) and early on they pull a quote from their reading research that I immediately thought of when I read this section.
“Sense of belonging among students is particularly important for student retention, particularly for students who experience mental health issues or disabilities and for students from underrepresented groups, such as low income, minoritized, or first generation college students” (Davis, 2012; O’Keeffe, 2013)
A strong sense of belonging within the student body seems like it has a multitude of related benefits, and if we can make students feel as though they belong in a learning space that also offers them resources to overcome their food insecurity not only will we get more students, but they will stay, and they will want to take part in the programs that keep a college environmentally and socially sustainable. This also made me think of a quote from the introductory chapter of the “Dive” section of Jenea Cohns “Skim, Dive, Surface”.
“When we say that reading can only happen in certain spaces at certain times, we’re ignoring all of the students who can’t read in those spaces at those times. ” By removing the barriers of when and where we provide food access, we open the door to a whole other set of people in need to can access those resources, and promote the idea that they belong there.
The second category is institutional culture, with the sections covering policies and structures, inclusivity, and awareness and accessibility. The figures used to depict these three sections are color coded to reflect the correlating issue within food insecurity, and gives me a lot of good inside for creating my final document.
The first section is policies and structures, which is described as “operating procedures that govern institutional structures and outcomes in ways that present barriers to bridging the food insecurity gap.” Within this section they identify the key first step in solving food insecurity to be identifying which of the students are food insecure. One of the ways in which some colleges have done this is by having students scan into the food pantries with their student ID’s, although that has it’s own issues when ID’s are deactivated due to financial holds, often the times in which a student needs the most support. Successful solutions seem to be an emphasis on need-based scholarships, and ongoing funding to purchase food for student food pantries as opposed to donation-based systems.
The second section is about awareness and accessibility, and while it was especially tailored to evaluate student needs in the depths of the pandemic, I think the work that was done must be continued and sustained to meet the need of working students. Universities have identified multiple forms in which a free food pantry or food bank can take, varying the options on their campus to allow as many students as possible to access tangible goods. These are forms include pantries and grab-and-go stations, but also resource centers with cooking lessons, and meal alert systems for extras from catered events. Options like these are beneficial not just for working students, but also for immuno-compromised students who are particularly vulnerable in the current climate.
The last section is inclusivity, and they highlight a specific case that should give Evergreen something to think about. They report on a campus that moved its food pantry to the on-site police station as they had plexiglass barriers good for social distancing, thinking that the move would encourage more students to use the pantry. However it seemed to have the opposite effects, and students reported that they had rarely if ever used the pantry since it had been relocated. Food is essential but this goes back to the desire to maintain dignity, and for some the need to maintain safety. Food isn’t accessible if you put it somewhere students don’t feel as though they can access. We have to have students trust if they are going to take help, by promoting inclusivity and belonging as well as food access in the classroom we can use them to fuel each other.
This paper closes with five final suggestions for solving food insecurity and providing basic needs to college students, and a call to action. Their final ideas are to create new models of financial aid, implementation of a care coordinator position and model, heightened campus gardening, new community partnerships, and support of policy that raises SNAP and WIC benefits and accessibility.
This paper provides me with a really good guideline for categories of problem-solving, and also helped me visualize the collaborations between digital reading and food access. The classroom, and the sense of community that comes with it, is the commons of the solution.
My other readings this week were all to find examples of colleges working to decrease campus hunger. I first read “BU Launches NewInitiative Aimed at Fighting Student Hunger” By Amy Laskowski, published in the BU Times which is the Boston University run news site (not a student newspaper). This article covered two ongoing programs to reduce food insecurity, and one launched this past Spring after receiving a grant from the Massachusetts Hunger-Free Campus Initiative. The Terrier Meal Share allows students to donate their guest passes to students in need, or on the other side request donated meals to be put on their card. Another program runs through the campus food pantry, allowing students to place an online order and pick up their food in the next few days, allowing for both choice and accessibility.
The newly implemented resource is a comprehensive website that makes easily accessible not only the on campus food resources but also free community dinners, food pantries, and information on SNAP and WIC benefits. I would love it if Evergreen had something like this, our website is chaotic and half the links don’t work. We need an online student support hub where you can access financial aid, the CCBLA, RAD, and more.
Next I read an article from University Business. It seems like the meal donation program through college meal plans is a pretty popular option for colleges, but is it really the best? The program at Evergreen is almost as limited as the cafeteria hours. ASU funded a full-time staffer and task force for their pantry, as well as mandating a list of items that must be kept in stock, and Indiana University students made and distributed boxes of fresh food to their peers. Perhaps this doesn’t make any sense but it feels like all of these solutions are to stop students from being hungry, rather than to end student hunger.
The article ends with what they advertise as nine potential solutions, however, I see them as nine essential elements to the solution rather than ones of their own. To highlight a few,
- Meaningfully and sensitively promote that food hunger exists, not only nationwide and surrounding communities but on campus.
4. A campus effort takes a variety of stakeholders. Any high-level talks for change should involve different campus leaders and include student populations, as well as the roles that each will fulfill in the effort.
7. Colleges do not operate in a vacuum. They serve large communities often impacted by food insecurity. Many of the students that attend urban and rural institutions are typically in the heart of the struggle. Networking with potential community partners and other businesses to overcome challenges, as North Texas has done, can help bridge those gaps more quickly.
The final article I read this week was “One in three students experience food insecurity nationwide. With state funding, local universities are ramping up efforts to tackle it.” by Emma Folts. This article reports on five Pittsburg colleges that received a grant to combat student hunger, their ideas and plans for the money, and the challenges facing students in the Pittsburg area. Alongside ideas for improved food pantries and campus gardens, I particularly liked a plan from the Pittsburg Technical College to distribute prepared frozen meals in difficult weeks for students such as finals week. This idea comes close to emulating the classroom to food to classroom support I think is needed for comprehensive problem-solving of student hunger.
So far I have two key ideas down for my final document:
-Food insecurity needs to be addressed in and out of the classroom, and the classroom must be flexible to student needs to accommodate students accessing resources. This includes not just campus policy, absences and scheduling, but also extends to the medium with which students can access class materials
-A sense of belonging in the student body community must be developed so students will feel able to access resources around their peers, as well as a sense of trust between the students in need and the resource staff so that students will be more likely to seek them out.
Next week I will be looking through the Evergreen archives for examples of past projects to combat student hunger, publications on food insecurity, and whatever I can find on previous administrations and students actions and philosophy when it comes to providing resources.