Our story begins with this statement from a student who participated in a 2018 focus group: 

“I’m a foreigner. I don’t have a family paying for me; I came here by myself. I have a child so I was working full-time; but when I started going to school … I had to drop down some hours. So, now my rent is more than what I make a month…. So, what are you going to have to cut down to pay what is important to you? Sometimes it’s food, sometimes utilities, sometimes it’s gas… Because you want to make something of yourself, you struggle.” 

Now, over three years later, our College Student Basic Needs Program is launching a comprehensive pilot program to address food and housing insecurity for at least 100 under-resourced students at GMercyU and MC3. Key features are: 

• A food shopping software students will use on their phones to order nutritious food from a close-by food pantry for delivery on campus; 
• A “Hub” website for students to more readily access food, housing, health, wellness and other basic needs resources on and off-campus; 
• A cost-based, affordable housing option for students to reside on-campus, coupled with a housing scholarship fund to provide on and off-campus financial assistance; and 
• Research to validate whether these programs result in positive academic outcomes. 

We plan to extend the program to other colleges and food pantries across the County if the pilot is successful. We still have a lot to do, but our experience so far may be instructive for other organizations addressing college student food and housing insecurity.

Step 1: Define Your Mission

We began in 2017 by GMercyU reaching out to MC3and Manna. Our three organizations (core partners) shared a common goal of helping food insecure students succeed academically. GMercyU and MC3 had just opened small food pantries. Manna saw serving food insecurestudents as an important mission extension. Our longer-range goal is to persuade academic leaders with hard data, measured outcomes and awareness building that helping under-resourced students will improve their academic performance and keep them in school and that doing so is core to the academic mission. This will, we hope, convince leaders to sustain our program with annually budgeted dollars, notwithstanding competing priorities.

Step 2: Take a Stepped Approach

During phase one (2018-19), we conducted research to address the scope and nature of our students’ food insecurity needs. We surveyed what other colleges across the country were doing, participated in Temple University’s Hope Center national survey, and conducted six student focus groups. We found that a large percentage of our students experienced food insecurity, and that food insecurity was inextricably tied to housing insecurity, jobs, child care, transportation, parking and other challenges that under-resourced students face. Our national research identified solutions that informed our phase two program planning. 

Step 3: Pick Your Partners Well

As our findings emerged, we invited four other non-profit organizations (supporting partners) to join our consortium. These organizations were identified because they had comprehensive food and housing expertise, were well-established and funded, had excellent reputations, were well-known to our three core partners, had connections to other resources and gave us reach across our very large county, all of which we felt would put us in a better position for post-phase two sustainability. 

• Pottstown Cluster of Religious Communities (provides food support for the MC3’s western campus); 
• Montgomery Anti-Hunger Network (addresses food distribution challenges for a network of 47 food pantries across the County); 
• Your Way Home Montgomery County (a public/private partnership which, through a variety of programs and funding streams, has a goal of reducing homelessness by 50% over five years); and 
• Family Promise Montco PA (provides opportunities for families to achieve self-sufficiency by offering community-based programs designed to bridge homelessness and become financially independent). 

Step 4: Be Highly Organized

Managing seven partners through a multi-phased, multi-faceted project requires a coordinated approach. So, we added key organizational elements, one-by-one: 

• A core partner representative has served as project coordinator from the beginning; 
• Our core partner representatives meet monthly to stay current and make key decisions; 
• We appoint ad hoc subgroups with subject matter experts for idea generation, expertise and recommendations to frame program elements; 
• We stress process planning first and then execute against plan and stay on track; 
• Executive leaders of all seven partners signed a memorandum of understanding to define our operating methods, handling of funds, confidentiality and other commitments; and 
• Our core group members have collaboratively and repeatedly drawn upon their respective organizations for expert advice on fundraising, research, diversity/equity/inclusion, student enrollment and financial aid to help design and implement program elements.

Step 5: Show Me the Money

No Money, No Mission is an old, but true, adage. Particularly so when your starting point is zero dollars and your partners, with tight budgets, can only contribute in-kind personnel. We advanced our fundraising by consistently: 

• Keeping fundraising as a top priority; 
• Having a realistic fundraising strategy (don’t spend money until it is committed); 
• Looking for grants which do not conflict with each partner’s own fundraising activities;
• Looking first to funding sources dedicated to initiatives in our locale; 
• Emphasizing our mission-driven collaboration; and 
• Laying out a responsible phased project plan, with each phase making the case for the next. 

Step 6: Resilience

The pandemic hit, requiring all three campuses to shut down in March 2020 on the eve of our pilot program launch. With no students on campus, we had to scrap the launch. However, not wanting to risk loss of momentum, we put our energy into being as well-funded and ready as possible for a new launch in Spring 2022. 

We began a multi-pronged, successful effort to raise more money than originally planned; selected a fiscal intermediary for grant administration and budgeting; researched and selected affordable housing options to implement; recruited interns for administrative support; negotiated a more flexible development and licensing agreement for our food ordering software; selected a developer for our “Hub” website; convened the academic team to design our research element; and adopted a racial and social equity framework to inform every aspect of our program. 

Importantly, we also managed through several core team personnel changes. We were able to do so because our team members feel a shared responsibility to not let our mission or each other down.

Step 7: Manage Constraints

Every program has constraints. Actively managing them is the point. Our three most significant have been: 1) how to get seven partners to work efficiently as a program becomes progressively more complex; 2) raising enough money in time to fund planned program expenses; and 3) gaining and maintaining institutional support. I’ve already touched on the first two. Here’s a perspective on the third. 

Our project has external funding, public relations and even government relations implications and internal personnel support requirements. These make it important for our core team members to keep their respective “higher-up” executives and lateral colleagues informed and available to facilitate institutional approvals. Examples run the gamut: grant support letters from our academic partner presidents; executive attendance at ribbon-cutting ceremonies; reporting to governing board committees; getting assurances that grants requests don’t conflict with institutional priorities; what percentage of dedicated personnel time is available for ever-increasing project work; and obtaining the assistance of other expert personnel not directly engaged in the project. These constraints require continual and careful attention to avoid administrative logjams and delays. 

But, we have found that managing these constraints affords opportunities to build board, executive and lateral support. Getting presidential letters of support for grants from time-to-time opens the door to keeping executives aware of, and educated about, our program. Reporting about our program to boards and governance committees charged with mission-oversight do too. Spreading the news of each new grant is another way, proving the old adage that “success breeds success”.

Step 8: Value Creation Through Collaboration

Collaboration can yield results. An example follows. While a continuing focus of our project has been food insecurity, during 2021 we convened a housing work group with four consortium members to research and evaluate numerous short and long-term affordable housing solutions. We settled on two for now. 

The first is a cost-finding model developed by GMercyU’s financial staff which calculates the numerous factors (e.g., debt service on financing to build the dorm and common area maintenance expense) that contribute to the carrying cost of vacant dorm space which can be made available to students with affordable housing needs. The students will pay what they can afford, supplemented by grants from a new housing scholarship fund (described below). GMercyU will recover some or all of the otherwise non-reimbursable carrying cost of otherwise unoccupied dorm rooms. One work group member will offer financial management and other support services for housing scholarship students. When fully refined and tested, the model will be available to other colleges across the county.

The second, sourced by another work group member, is a housing scholarship fund. Our consortium was awarded a competitive “Home4Good” grant ($45,000) under a state-wide Federal Home Loan Bank program to seed the fund. This has been supplemented ($5,000) by a local church sourced by another work group member. Students who live on campus and off will be eligible for these scholarships, including benefitting from the affordable dorm cost model referenced above. Our housing work group is now developing the criteria and process for awarding these scholarships for the next academic year. 

Finally, we are examining a strategy to access American Rescue Plan Act funding administered through our county recovery office to supplement the affordable scholarship fund and provide funds for more capital intensive off-campus housing models our work group has identified. 

Step 9: The Secret Sauce – Trust

The currency of successful collaboratives is trust. Our consortium has knit together a trust rooted in the joy of working together to help under-resourced students, understanding each other’s needs, respecting each other’s concerns and not disappointing each other. We do this by asking questions, active listening, being open to new ideas, being responsive and being genuine with each other. All by Zoom. 

Our plate is quite full now, but we sleep well. So may our students.