At Michelson 20MM Foundation, we believe that students deserve more than access to college—they deserve the stability, dignity, and support needed to persist and thrive. Yet for millions of students across California, basic needs insecurity remains a daily barrier to academic success. Housing instability, food insecurity, gaps in public benefits, and limited access to paid career pathways too often force students to choose between survival and education.

To address these issues, Michelson 20MM is proud to announce the 2025 Student Basic Needs Spark Grant recipients—three outstanding organizations advancing bold, systems-level solutions to strengthen student stability and economic mobility across the state. This year’s grantees reflect a shared commitment to tackling root causes, aligning systems, and building scalable models that can influence policy and practice far beyond a single campus or community.

California Competes: Aligning Public Benefits and Higher Education at Scale

California Competes is launching California Alliance for Streamlining Public Investments and Resources for Every Student (California ASPIRES), a statewide coalition dedicated to streamlining how students access public benefits while pursuing higher education. The coalition brings together leaders from higher education systems, state agencies, workforce and human services organizations, philanthropy, and—critically—students themselves.

Functioning as a connective infrastructure that aligns policies, data, and implementation efforts across systems, California ASPIRES seeks to reduce administrative barriers that prevent students from accessing food, housing, healthcare, childcare, and income supports. Students from all three public higher education segments helped design the coalition’s mission and governance and will continue to shape priorities through advisory and coalition roles. Centering student voices will enable solutions that are responsive to real barriers students face.

NextGen Policy: Building Debt-Free Pathways to Economic Mobility

NextGen Policy is convening a statewide policy coalition that brings together industry, higher education, workforce entities, and policymakers to build a comprehensive apprenticeship ecosystem—one that expands opportunities beyond traditional trades into high-demand and emerging fields. 

Modernizing and scaling apprenticeship pathways will offer students a paid, debt-free path to family-sustaining careers. For students facing financial insecurity, paid work-based learning can be transformative, supporting basic needs today while opening doors to long-term economic mobility.

Raise The Barr: Reimagining Emergency Aid as Systems Infrastructure

Raise The Barr is reframing emergency student aid from a short-term relief mechanism into a systems-level intervention that can be examined, aligned, and institutionalized across higher education settings. 

Rather than creating a new program or platform, this project focuses on learning and alignment. By analyzing how timing, design, and coordination affect housing stability, public benefits access, and enrollment persistence, Raise The Barr aims to generate practical, transferable frameworks that colleges can embed into existing systems. The result will be actionable guidance to help emergency aid move from grant-dependent relief to sustainable, student-centered institutional practice.

Why This Matters

Together, the 2025 Student Basic Needs Spark Grantees reflect what’s possible when innovation meets equity. These projects recognize that student success does not happen in silos—and neither should solutions. We are honored to support this year’s grantees and look forward to sharing more as their work unfolds.

About the Michelson 20MM Foundation

Michelson 20MM is a private, nonprofit foundation working toward equity for underserved and historically underrepresented communities by expanding access to educational and employment opportunities, increasing affordability of educational programs, and ensuring the necessary supports are in place for individuals to thrive. To do so, we work in the following verticals: Digital Equity, Intellectual Property, Smart Justice, Student Basic Needs, and Open Educational Resources (OER). Co-chaired and funded by Alya and Gary Michelson, Michelson 20MM is part of the Michelson Philanthropies network of foundations.

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