Nearly one in four undergraduates and one in eight graduate students face food insecurity. On some campuses, half of all students report not having enough to eat. No campus should assume that these students will just figure things out.
Thus I am delighted to read that the CSU and SUNY systems are now funding staff to help to screen students for federal SNAP food benefits and to connect students with other resources for which they're eligible, as they also invest in campus food banks to help to meet students' basic needs. Of course these programs matter for retention, just as social events and tutoring matter for keeping students connected to campus.
Beyond that local work, the administrators of these systems also advocate for specific policy changes in the SNAP program currently being considered in congress that would ease students' access to these benefits.
I wonder what would happen if students themselves were engaged in lobbying for these changes? What if becoming educated meant that poor and working-class students learned to organize as advocates for policy that acknowledged the circumstances of their lives? What if first-generation support groups included training in the politics of inequality as students became agents in the political systems that deprive their communities of resources? What if they learned deeper levels of political agency while also learning the gratitude they so often are asked to express for what others did for them?
What are the arguments against poor and working-class students learning to work to begin to bend political systems to their needs and the needs of their communities?
