This resource links to a webpage created by the Maricopa County Community Colleges District (MCCCD) that provides students with campus and community services to aid in meeting basic life needs.  Other institutions of higher education may find this example useful when creating a local solution. Addressing basic needs issues boosts academic performance, helping the institution and its students retain federal financial aid. It also promotes enrollment, retention, and degree completion, helping the institution generate more tuition dollars and improving outcomes about which legislators and the community care.

In 2016, MCCCD participated in a basic needs insecurity study run by Sara Goldrick-Rab, founding Director of the Hope Center for College, Community, and Justice and Professor of Higher Education Policy & Sociology at Temple University.  Approximately 2000 MCCCD students responded to the #RealCollege survey, which is the nation’s largest, longest-running annual assessment of basic needs insecurity among college students.  The 2017 findings report drove MCCCD to respond by “Creating a culture of caring” among its 10 colleges where everyone contributes to multi-generational impacts by addressing basic life needs of students such as hunger, housing, child care, transportation, and health and well-being.   

Key realizations and strategies employed MCCCD as they respond to the challenges that real college students face in their daily lives, provide valuable guidance to other institutions hoping to embark on a similar journey:

1. Get to know your students - age, gender, ethnicity, demographics, poverty rates based on zip codes, dependents - infants, elder care, and other characteristics.  A stratified sample of students and their emails can be used to administer the #RealCollege survey at no cost.

2. It has to be local and relevant to make it accessible to students in need at your institution.

3. We (the educators) can’t do it all. - who in the community is already providing services and can partner?

   1. Bring in social services, agencies, people who do this everyday - e.g., reach out to your local United Way outreach specialist.   Ask who else to involve. Host a luncheon to begin conversations and make connections. You will discover many organizations that are looking to connect with higher education.

   2. The state department of economic security may be a potential funding resource and connection to jobs and unemployment resources.

4. Your community partners can help vet the potential service providers for legitimacy and hidden costs, and recommend the right ones that your students qualify for.

5. What are other higher education institutions doing to address basic needs insecurity?  What is their framework, what organizations are on their website, what is the website experience?  Examples include Oregon State University, UC Berkeley, and Amarillo College’s culture of caring.  

6. Consider items above when designing your main focus areas and service providers. 

7. Get over perfection paralysis - start small,  show the need and the value. Iterate and respond with updates as new needs arise, e.g. job listings and unemployment, infant pantry’s, loaner computing devices, refurbished computers, and Wifi hotspots.   

8.  Who to bring in from your institution(s) to be on the core team: Student Life, faculty, counselors, deans, and students who value this work.

See also the Hope Center’s Beyond the Food Pantry: Getting Started Addressing Basic Needs Insecurity on Campus.

Keywords: basic life needs, food pantry, Hope Center, basic needs insecurity, #RealCollege