[Applause]
okay do you remember the moment when you
realized what you wanted to do with your
life I do it was just a couple years
back and I have recently moved into a
new apartment that overlooked my old
college campus and I was telling a
friend how much I liked the view and I
mentioned you know sort of offhandedly
at first I said it’s so fitting that I
live so close to school now because
campus always felt like home to me
anyways and it was true as an
undergraduate student I was very
involved on campus I was the president
my sorority I served on student
government I started a school spirit
club school was my life campus was home
and when I sent those words that day it
just hit me and I thought oh my gosh if
I study higher education then I can work
on college campuses forever and house
never have to leave so I did and Here I
am I talked about that story you know
that moment often when explaining to
people why I’m so passionate about
higher education or why I like working
with college students but there’s a part
of the story that I usually leave out
and that is exactly why College felt
like home to me back then and it wasn’t
just because of friends or student
organizations it was because for a
period during that time I didn’t really
have anywhere else to call home I was
homeless it turns out I was not the only
one it’s estimated that there were
upwards of fifty eight thousand homeless
students on college campuses nationwide
and this is likely a low estimate a more
recent study of community college
students found that 14 percent were
homeless and half 50% were experiencing
housing insecurity I became a part of
this statistic after the economy crashed
in 2008 and I lost my job shortly after
my
car was repossessed I was evicted from
two different apartments and I had
failed four semesters worth of classes
my life was in a constant state of
upheaval but through all this I kept
just trying to go to school it never
even occurred to me to take a break and
plus I didn’t want to drop out of school
being a student was my entire life I
identified as being a student I never
identified as being homeless since then
I’ve become very passionate about
helping at-risk students succeed and
after working with this population for
several years now I’m realizing more and
more that homelessness truly is a hidden
problem especially among college
students and this is largely due to
misconceptions that we have about
homelessness that make it hard for us to
accept that this problem can happen to
students prior to working in this field
I had misconceptions about what
homelessness looked like I bet that
everyone here has a very specific
stereotype that comes to mind when I say
the word homeless right this is what I
looked like when I was homeless doesn’t
really fit the stereotype does it most
of our students won’t there are
different definitions of homelessness
that range from people living in
shelters or sleeping in their cars to
those facing eviction or people that are
couchsurfing like I was most students
aren’t even aware that what they’re
experiencing is homelessness and even if
they were no student wants to be labeled
as homeless anyways
students just want to fit in and they
will try their hardest to keep their
situation hidden another mistake we make
is that we assume that students have
some level of family privilege so we
assume that students have families and
parents those families are safe and
stable loving we assume that families
are able to provide financial support
including housing to the student if
needed so you know how can a student be
homeless can’t they just move back home
unfortunately that’s not the reality of
a lot of our students
I definitely was not my reality
sometimes there are no parents no family
or the family maybe unable or unwilling
to provide support of any kind there
might not be a childhood or family home
to return to in my situation
although I was occasionally able to
crash at my dad’s place his living
situation wasn’t safe or stable so it
wasn’t really an option for me
I was lucky at the fact that I pretty
much always had a place to sleep even if
it was inconsistent but all the
instability still had a huge effect on
every aspect of my life especially my
academics before all this started
happening I was a Dean’s List student
now this is hardly scientific evidence
because this is just based on my GPA but
one would not be wrong to assume that
being homeless may have negatively
impacted my grades probably
unfortunately we don’t know how this
problem affects other students because
we have very little data on this subject
we haven’t done a good job of
identifying homeless students giving
them support and resources and tracking
their progress through college even when
we’ve known that we have homeless
students on our campuses just recently
EMU made national news when it was
discovered that a student was sleeping
in his car and in this library people
seemed shocked that such a big problem
could be going on seemingly unnoticed
but when you don’t have any data it’s
really hard to prove that a problem
even exists but it does exist let me
tell you it is really hard to focus on
school if you don’t know where you’re
going to sleep at night I recently
attended a lecture on housing and the
speaker said something that really stuck
with me he said without stable housing
everything else falls apart students
cannot learn if their basic needs are
not being met and we cannot help them
achieve success until we are willing to
admit that homelessness is a problem on
our cam
and it is a problem but it is not one
that colleges need to solve alone in
fact this is a great opportunity for
colleges to collaborate with community
organizations that are already doing
this type of work
EMU Washington Community College and
ozone house recently launched the MOR
program which places support for
homeless students from ozone house right
on those college campuses and our new
millennial ozone board is going to be
doing outreach in the community and on
campuses raising awareness and helping
connect students to resources these are
just a couple of examples of what this
collaboration is looking like right here
in our community and now that all of you
are aware of this problem you can also
help be a part of our solution and
there’ll be lots of ways for you to
continue to help moving forward to work
but for now an easy way to start is
simply by rejecting stereotypes and
misconceptions that you may have had
about homelessness and instead
acknowledging that this problem exists
for far too long
homeless students have been hidden on
our campuses and they deserve an
opportunity to succeed in college and I
believe that if we continue working
together we can give our students all
students the opportunity to achieve
success thank you [Applause]