CUNY CARES hires college students like Liliana Cornejo (proper) to assist join their friends to meals, housing and well being care help.
Picture courtesy CUNY Revolutionaries
When Liliana Cornejo enrolled at York Faculty in 2019, she didn’t know concerning the many sources which can be accessible to assist CUNY college students on their educational journeys. Cornejo, a single mother or father initially from Ecuador, didn’t find out about monetary assist or companies for college kids who’re immigrants. She wasn’t conscious of sources to assist college students discover meals and housing help, or the place to go if she wanted a health care provider or felt overwhelmed. And she or he was afraid to ask.
Cornejo, who will graduate subsequent month with a level in occupational remedy, is aware of there are lots of college students who’ve comparable questions and wishes. Now, she helps others discover assist as a paid scholar supervisor for CUNY CARES, an initiative the college launched this fall at CUNY’s three campuses within the Bronx, to attach extra college students with meals, housing and well being care help and assist them meet an array of different wants.
Amongst different methods, CUNY CARES recruits, trains and pays scholar advocates to make shows in lecture rooms, use social media to unfold details about helps and drive a concerted effort to succeed in extra weekend and night college students, student-parents and college students with disabilities.
“We’re connecting college students to a number of totally different alternatives and instructing them tips on how to navigate the system independently to succeed. That is the sort of work that may change so many lives,” mentioned Cornejo, who trains different college students to work with this system at Bronx Group Faculty.
Deal with Important Wants
CUNY is placing a brand new deal with elements exterior the classroom that too typically pose obstacles to college students’ success, together with psychological well being, starvation and unstable housing.
Half of all CUNY college students come from households with family incomes beneath $30,000, and lots of discover themselves struggling to fulfill the essential requirements of every day life. Our surveys have discovered that just about 4 in 10 college students don’t have sufficient to eat at instances, or sufficient cash to pay the lease and that a number of thousand have skilled homelessness.
Researchers, together with these from CUNY’s Graduate College of Public Well being and Well being Coverage, have discovered that housing and meals insecurity are the strongest predictors of tension and despair amongst school college students and people, in flip, pose critical impediments to their skill to remain on monitor for commencement.
CUNY college students have entry to a variety of assist companies that may mitigate meals and housing insecurity and promote their well being and well-being. The problem is that many college students don’t find out about these helps, or don’t know they’re eligible, and a few are reluctant to hunt assist for worry of being stigmatized.
We’ve discovered, as an illustration, that about 40% of CUNY college students qualify to obtain federal advantages just like the Supplemental Diet Help Program (SNAP) and Medicaid, however solely 40% of those that qualify are at the moment enrolled. It implies that this system has the potential to deliver an estimated $25 million in public advantages into the family budgets of scholars at our Bronx campuses.
College students Lifting College students
CUNY CARES is constructed on the premise that college students who could also be struggling or reluctant to ask for assist want assist from empathetic friends who might have skilled these points themselves. Beneath the path {of professional} employees that features a full-time housing specialist, this system promotes entry to housing help and campus meals pantries, well being care and psychological well being companies.
This essential new endeavor is funded by a public-private partnership with the Petrie Basis and Andrew W. Mellon Basis, together with the Mayor’s Workplace of Financial Alternative and the mayor’s Public Engagement Unit. We’re piloting this system for 3 years at Lehman Faculty, Hostos Group Faculty and Bronx Group Faculty, within the metropolis borough that has the very best charges of poverty. It is a crucial piece in our work to remodel CUNY into the nation’s most student-centered college, a imaginative and prescient that’s detailed in our 2023-30 strategic roadmap.
We imagine CUNY CARES has the potential to be transformative. We hope it is going to turn out to be a mannequin not just for CUNY campuses throughout the town however for universities throughout the nation.
Matos Rodríguez is the chancellor of The Metropolis College of New York (CUNY), the biggest city public college system in the US.
