How One College Used a Faculty-Led Project to Connect their Students to Basic Needs Resources

This is a guest blog by the Student-Centered Design Team at SJI.

Student services are an essential part of any college or university campus, helping students connect to the supports they may need to persist in and complete their studies. Yet faculty are often not well integrated into this aspect of the institution, even though they are particularly well positioned to support students' access to resources. Faculty are the people that students interact with the most, often the first to identify student issues in real time, and key among those at the college whom students might turn to for support.

In our work to help colleges connect students to basic needs resources, faculty involvement has been critical. Students may not access resources for a variety of reasons, including lack of awareness, lack of time, complex processes and requirements, stigma, fear, and/or confusion about how to start and where to go. When faculty are aware of the resources available and can quickly connect students to them, many of these obstacles are diminished.

What does it look like to engage faculty in basic needs work? We wanted to highlight a successful short-term faculty-led effort at Chemeketa Community College, a CAEL institutional member. As a participant in our Benefits for Success Career and Technical Education (CTE) Academy, the Chemeketa team (consisting of five business faculty, their dean, and a student services staff member) set a goal of improving their business students' access to financial and basic needs resources at the college. Read on to learn how they reached this goal by progressing through the key phases of the Academy: identifying a need, conducting research (validating the need), and engaging in collaborative solution design.

Identifying a Need
"We saw this Academy as an opportunity for faculty from our different business and technology programs to come together to have a broader, long-term impact by developing ways to connect students to financial and basic needs supports at the college.'

-R. Taylor, Executive Director, Center for Business and Industry, Business Programming, and ECE

The Chemeketa team believed that business students in non-cohort-based programs were underutilizing resources at the college. They had observed that students in cohort-based programs were more likely to take advantage of financial supports at the college, likely due to the increased connections and peer information sharing that occur within a cohort model. The team hypothesized that business students with basic needs insecurity had less opportunity to learn about the resources available and believed that business faculty could help reduce this awareness gap.

Collaborative Research (Validating the Need)
To validate this hypothesis, and to better understand students' experiences, the Chemeketa team and SJI worked collaboratively to design a student survey. The survey was intended to help the team gauge the level of financial need among business students, learn the extent to which students were aware of and accessing resources, and ascertain whether there might be opportunity for faculty to help connect more students to these resources.

The survey took place in mid-2021, with results indicating a high level of need among business students, most likely exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic. In line with national research, Chemeketa's survey found that 68% of respondents said that they often worry about having enough money to pay for school and 61% of respondents said that they often worry about being able to pay their current living expenses. More than half of respondents indicated that they would have trouble getting $500 to meet an unexpected need in the next month.

The survey also highlighted an opportunity to provide more students with information about the resources available at the college. While most students indicated that they had heard of the financial aid office and Chemeketa foundation scholarships, they were less familiar with other resources, such as emergency funds, the college's SNAP Training and Employment Program (STEP), and college access programs such as TRIO.

The survey also asked students whether they had spoken with anyone at the college about their financial needs, and if so, who. The most frequently cited responses were financial aid advisors, academic advisors, and faculty members. This finding indicated that their idea of engaging faculty to bring more and timely information to business students would be a potentially viable solution.

The survey results helped the Chemeketa team validate their assumption that business students could benefit from increased connections to resources at the college, and that faculty have an important role to play in making these connections.

Collaborative Solution Design
Armed with the results of the survey, the team's next step was to design their solution. How might faculty be engaged to help close the resource awareness gap among students? After considering several options, the team chose to create a visually appealing flyer and Canvas module with essential information about four key resources (financial, food, technology, and counseling) for faculty to share with students in class.

The team then engaged in an exercise which required them to put themselves in the shoes of students. To gather the information needed for the flyer and module, the faculty members split up the four resources and sought to access each resource as a student might. Their task was to identify what each resource provided, when it was available, and where and how to access it. This exercise provided them with important insights on how to align available information with the questions that students might have.

Once the team had gathered the information they needed, they worked collaboratively to translate it into concise, student-friendly language that conveyed only what students needed to know about each resource. Below are some images of the flyer.

The front of the flyer, containing visual and verbal cues to learn more about each resource, along with QR codes to direct students to relevant information online.

Two examples from the back of the flyer, containing key information on how to access each resource.

After the flyer and the Canvas module were complete, the team identified dissemination methods that faculty could use to share these materials with students. These methods included placing large posters of the flyer in business classrooms and buildings, creating smaller handout versions, and making an electronic version available for digital sharing.

Faculty member Bryan Monson displays a poster hanging in a classroom.

To further bring together student services and faculty, the business dean scheduled 30-minute Zoom 'coffee break' sessions designed to both introduce the flyer and Canvas module and allow faculty to learn more about resources available to support their students.

The benefit of these efforts was twofold. Not only were faculty able to provide resource information to students, but they were also able to increase their own awareness and understanding of resources at the college'knowledge that they can then pass on to students.

Key Learnings
While the larger issue of basic needs insecurity must be addressed at both the system and policy levels, department-level efforts such as this one can have an immediate impact on the lives of students, connecting them to vital resources that can help them stay enrolled and achieve their educational goals. Integrating faculty into these efforts'especially those who immerse themselves in the student experience'is a promising practice through which faculty can play a more intentional and informed role in supporting students holistically. It is our hope that this example can serve as inspiration for similar efforts that both leverage the power of faculty and facilitate partnerships between faculty members and student services.