Alarming numbers of college students, even at some of the most prestigious universities across the country, struggle financially, affecting their access to housing and food. Those personal crises make it difficult for students to succeed academically. Research has shown that students who don’t get enough to eat have lower grades and lower graduation rates. The Basic Needs programs on the ten University of California campuses provide a suite of services to support students in need.
Francis Ge, the Basic Needs Coordinator with the Center for Agroecology, UC Santa Cruz, was an assistant manager of a farm in Virginia, did research for the NY State Department of Agriculture on connecting urban farmers to communities in need, and worked for the New York City Farm to School program. In addition to her work with the Basic Needs program, Francis is the Assistant Farm Manager at UCSC, the first organic farm on a college campus in the US. Arty Mangan of Bioneers interviewed Francis Ge about how she is addressing the problem of student hunger.
ARTY MANGAN: Since you’ve been working with the Basic Needs program, what have you learned about student hunger?
FRANCIS GE: It’s way more prevalent than I would have believed before I got here. If you go on the Basic Needs dashboard at the UC Office of the President website, it has all the data from all ten UCs, and it’s broken down by demographic and class year, etc. Even though UC is one of the best and wealthiest university systems and obviously located in California, which has food in abundance, the rate of food insecurity on campus at the UCs is anywhere from 35 to 45%, which is just astronomical.
I think the rate of food insecurity in the U.S. is close to 13%, and higher in children. College students struggle to pay the bills — food, rent, books, etc. There is a trope of college students being really poor and only eating pizza and Ramen, but people don’t realize that having good nutritious food and not being stressed about access to food or when you’re going to get your next meal has a huge impact on students’ academic performance and on their persistence and graduation rates. We are finding that after Basic Needs programs are implemented, the students who are using them and who then report higher food security also have higher grades and are graduating at higher rates.
ARTY: When I saw the statistics, it was alarming to me that college students are experiencing food insecurity at such high rates. I assumed that if you’re going to go to college, you’re going to have your meals taken care of one way or another, but obviously that is not the case.
FRANCIS: I feel that public institutions should be able to take care of the people who physically live on their campuses. It shouldn’t be so hard for students to meet their basic needs.
ARTY: In a 2021 report by the organization Feeding America entitled “Addressing Teen Hunger,” one of the key findings was that teens feel a stigma around hunger and actively hide it as much as they can.
FRANCIS: We do find this is true. Basic Needs has been around for about 10 years now, and especially at the beginning, food insecurity and hunger were highly stigmatized. A lot of our work is about making our programs open to everybody so there are no eligibility requirements. You don’t have to prove you’re hungry or poor in order to get food from us.
We also make our spaces really welcoming and our communication really accessible and de-stigmatizing. That is a big part of our work, but now that we’re getting generations of college students who already know that our programs exist before they get on campus, they think it’s more normal for food to be free or really low cost and for healthy food from the farm to be available to them when they need it, so we’re seeing a culture shift in which students are taking each other on dates to our non-transactional coffee shop/café, and we’re like, “hey you guys, this is for students who don’t have meal plans who need to get some food or a snack to get through the day.” It’s become such a popular hangout spot that we cannot keep up with demand, so the culture is shifting, and we’re doing that intentionally.
Our students are really great ambassadors for this. A lot of the students we hire personally have experienced food insecurity, or they’ve applied for CalFresh (California’s Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program). Every student who has an on-campus job now qualifies for CalFresh, if they’re a citizen, so lots of our students have CalFresh and are really open about talking about it. Students tell each other that it’s cool to apply for these benefits. CalFresh does more than what we can for their food security because it gets money in their pocket every month during the year, while most of our programs only run during the school year and not on breaks and holidays.
ARTY: Going back to the Feeding America report addressing teen hunger, another finding was that teens have a lot of opinions about school meal programs and ideas about how to strengthen them. How much agency do students have in shaping your program?
FRANCIS: Students have a lot of say in shaping the Basic Needs programming. Students who work for Basic Needs at the farm, at the Cowell Coffee Shop, at the free market and produce pop-ups contribute directly to Basic Needs programming. We also get a lot of feedback from the people who use the services, and we try to incorporate that. We even get feedback on which crops they want to see in the coffee shop and free market. We try to grow based on what the students are asking for.
So, students have a lot of say in the details in day-to-day operations, even what music is playing to make it more welcoming, but that’s not the case with the dining halls, which are the biggest food security apparatus on campus. They feed something like 9,000 people a day.
I also supervise the student team that does research into more sustainable sourcing for dining hall procurement, so we are working on improving that, but I don’t know how much direct feedback the dining hall takes.
ARTY: Could you describe the whole system of support that addresses food insecurity on campus. You talked about a produce pop-up stand and non-transactional café. What are some of the other aspects of the program? How does it all work together?
FRANCIS: The food side of the Basic Needs programming at UCSC includes distribution sites. One is the Cowell Coffee Shop, the non-transactional café. It is the culinary aspect of the program, in which students are cooking, and there’s also a downstairs café area where they prepare and serve the food. Students just swipe in with their student ID, and then they can take what they need from the coffee shop at no charge. There’s usually coffee there every day as well as bagels, salads and whatever fun stuff the students in the kitchen are cooking up.
There’s also a more traditional pantry called the Redwood Free Market that has dry goods and shelf stable food, as well as fresh produce to take home. We partner with the Second Harvest Food Bank to provide those dry goods.
The Redwood Market also has a diaper program for parenting students and a fill station for soaps and shampoos and stuff like that, and they have a little kitchen in there too, so that’s a place to go to get all sorts of groceries.
The produce pop-up is a twice-weekly farm stand that happens on campus, with food directly from the farm and from the farmer’s market. When we can’t source as much from the farm in the winter, we source from local farmers, so we are supporting farmers in our community as well.
The farm on campus produces a lot of food for Basic Needs too. A lot of the funding goes towards infrastructure, such as getting new irrigation, buying seeds, paying the students and the managers at the farm, etc. Those are the programs funded by Basic Needs.
A really important part of our food security program that doesn’t involve physically giving people food is the CalFresh Outreach Program. Students can get up to $280 a month just on their EBT card if they apply. There’s an outreach program that helps students apply and get through their interview and get all their paperwork together, with student outreach ambassadors available to help them do that.
Basic Needs also assists students with housing. If students are in crisis because they got kicked out at home or they can’t afford the rent deposit, etc. they can go to Slug Support (which helps student navigate difficult circumstances and find solutions to keep them out of crisis). We know that food insecurity, housing insecurity, being able to pay for your tuition, technology, transportation to campus, childcare, dependent care, those are all related. Generally, if people don’t have enough money to pay for food, it’s because they’re struggling to pay for housing or tuition. Slug Support can help students in those multi-faceted crises situations. It’s holistic support.
But all of this is at the crisis response level; they are stop-gap measures. What we do on a daily basis doesn’t solve structural food insecurity or poverty or the problem of super high rental prices in Santa Cruz. If students are hungry, we feed them. The medium-term project is teaching students how to farm, how to cook and how to make healthy food for themselves. For long term policy and legislation, Tim Galarneau, Co-Director of Education and Training for UC Essential Needs Consortium works on that.
ARTY: It’s an impressive array of offerings to help mitigate and solve the problems. Do students who aren’t food insecure abuse the program, or do you just not worry about that? I think it would be really tempting to walk by the non-transactional café for a student to say, hey, I’m going to go and grab something to eat and I don’t have to pay for it.
FRANCIS: We do get students who are on the meal plan but still come to our sites, but I don’t think I would call it abusing the programs because almost no students live on campus all four years. Then they will need to pay rent and buy pots and pans and maybe even a refrigerator, so it’s good that all the students know about our resources and feel comfortable coming to them because Basic Needs is non-linear. At any given point, students can suddenly find themselves in a situation in which they become food insecure.
We serve about 7,000 unique students over the course of the year across all of our programs which is more than a third of the population, so that is obviously a lot of students, but it’s not as high as the rate of food insecurity reported on campus, which is over 40 %.
ARTY: Feeding 7,000 students is no small accomplishment, and yet there are still many students being underserved. Why is that?
FRANCIS: Not everybody will know about our sites or feel comfortable coming to them. About one quarter of students graduate every year, and then new students come in who are also facing food insecurity. There has to be constant messaging and outreach to each new population of students.
We encourage students to use the resources before they’re really in crisis. We encourage them to use our resources the way they would use a gym or a library—they’re there for everyone, in order to support their success at school. We don’t get lots of students who return every single day or every single week. We find that students will come and use us if they’re in a pinch, or if they’re walking by that day, or if we happen to see them and reach out and talk to them, but our services are not really designed to be able to provide everybody’s groceries every week while they’re in school, so there’s a mix of how people use our programs.
ARTY: Would you like to share a success story about students who’ve been affected by your program?
FRANCIS: I think our biggest success stories are our student staff and managers. We often hire students, and we don’t know or ask about their personal food security or housing security situation when we hire them, but sometimes it’ll come out later that they were housing and/or food insecure, and they applied for CalFresh with this program. We had a crop of students who were online interns with our programs during the pandemic, and when they got to campus, we hired them to work on the farm. They worked for a little while they increased in both their competence and their emotional investment in the farm and their desire to see the farm do well. We promoted them to student managers, so they would each take on an area of the farm, such as harvest, the farm stand, or irrigation, or propagation, and manage an aspect of the farm with us. As their competence increased, so did their responsibility. They’re actually growing the food to feed themselves and their peers. They’re teaching the interns that are coming after them.
Students who came to us right after the pandemic have all graduated now. One of them is working at the Center for Agroecology. Another is working for Food What?! One of them is working at Fifth Crow Farm. One of the Cowell Coffee Shop student managers is now a line cook at a really nice local restaurant. A good deal of the students who get experience working with our Basic Needs programming translate the technical, leadership and teamwork skills that they learned here into getting jobs in the food system and are making an impact in the larger society.
The post Tackling Student Hunger: An Interview with Francis Ge of the Basic Needs Program at UC Santa Cruz appeared first on Bioneers.