Student Basic Needs Funding Cycle Focus Areas

• Systemic approaches and actionable strategies for higher education systems to address student housing insecurity and housing affordability. We are primarily focused on:
  
  • Integrating affordable housing into broader student basic needs strategies across higher education systems, for example, rising utility costs and tenant rights
  • Aligning housing plans, policies, and implementation efforts across segments (e.g., community colleges, CSU, UC)
  • Leveraging and streamlining existing housing grant programs and funding mechanisms to maximize impact
  • Innovative approaches that utilize existing housing infrastructure and cross-sector partnerships to address the housing crisis
  • Policy advocacy efforts that systematically address student housing insecurity
• Innovative approaches that strengthen equitable economic mobility and long-term student stability. Areas in which we hope to achieve this include:
  
  • Expanding workforce development pipelines that promote economic mobility for low-income and first-generation students (including those that strategically leverage work study).
  • Efforts that expand and streamline student access, enrollment, and maintaining of  public benefits at scale, including CalFresh, CalWORKs, and Medi-Cal
  • Models that move basic needs operations from grant-based to sustainable, institutionalized systems with skilled, permanent staff (including innovative approaches that mitigate the impact of recent federal policy shifts).
• Actionable research, data, and strategies that inform policy and advocacy efforts. Priorities include:
  
  • Research and practice that supports timely policy response to emerging federal and state changes, (e.g., HR1 impacts), such as expanded emergency aid from campuses and government funding
  • Student-centered storytelling, narrative-building, and messaging that strengthen advocacy and policy implementation
  • Data collection and analysis related to student access to healthcare and public benefits (including Medi-Cal enrollment and uninsured student populations)
  • Analysis of funding flows and impact, including federal dollars brought into California through student benefit enrollment
  • Tools and systems that improve tracking, coordination, and responsiveness to both short-term and long-term basic needs challenges