The semester was about to start and Lopez told Yu that she really needed textbooks. “[Textbooks] are ridiculously expensive—[but] we found a website for affordable textbooks online,” says Yu. “And she also mentioned that she was trying to figure out her resume and cover letters for after graduation, so I gave her contact info for [Lehman College’s] career center. She was so grateful—we [students] don’t realize we’re paying for these things that are there to help us out.”
By early February, Yu had taken on 65 CUNY clients with varying challenges—although none, yet, who’d needed her to speak in Cantonese (other navigators speak Spanish, Urdu, and Bengali). By that point in time, navigators had helped 270 students at 21 CUNY campuses—116 with SNAP applications, and 166 with other food resources including food banks and public school Grab-and-Go meals within walking distance of where they were living. It takes 30 days to process a SNAP application and longer for benefits to actually arrive, which underlines the importance of emergency food providers for getting students through lean days and weeks.
Several clients stuck out in Yu’s mind because of the depth of their need. A few students had requested mental health service recommendations. Others are “more concerned about housing—it could be a landlord issue, or they can’t afford to pay rent, which a local tenant housing official can take up” on their behalf, Yu says. Two students didn’t have documents to prove their addresses, although Yu knew from her training that “You can still apply if you’re homeless or don’t have identification—it’s [the SNAP office’s] responsibility to get you an ID.”
Meanwhile, Yu had been grappling with her own housing and food insecurity—as well as with discomfort about asking for assistance. She says that acting as a navigator for other students has been eye-opening. “They are experiencing similar things to myself. It’s normally just me feeling isolated and like things are insurmountable, and it’s really wild how little we know about each others’ lives. It’s really revealing.”
She’s heard from other navigators that they’re all beginning to feel more confident in contacting students and teasing out information in unobtrusive ways. “A lot of struggles are unseen, and sometimes people [also] struggle with admitting they need help,” she explains.
The navigators were also planning to hold weekly virtual workshops for each other, to share the skills they’d been accumulating along the way—such as how to address the nutritional side of food access, and ways to offer trauma-informed care (Yu’s specialty). They were thinking, too, of hosting open-to-the-public watch parties for documentaries and an upcoming food forum hosted by the mayor’s office. She thought the watch parties might create space for food justice conversations to happen, and an opportunity to alert more students about the peer network.
What success rate the program can expect is still unknown. However, SOH conducted a pilot during the spring and summer of 2020 that connected 656 students with $628,000 worth of SNAP benefits over a three-month period.
CUNY’s Urban Food Policy Institute (UFPI) piloted a similar effort in 2018 at Hostos Community College and John Jay College of Criminal Justice. UFPI director Nicholas Freudenberg says in that program, “Ten [student] advocates working limited hours connected 1,200 students to campus-based services. That tells you about the scale you need to get to 10,000, or 100,000 students. It also provides proof of concept; the majority of students we surveyed said they would accept help from a peer.”
In California, Bartholow says a conversation with peer navigators a couple of years ago revealed that they were able to help student clients make it to the end of the “SNAP application maze” 100 percent of the time. Could clients manage it without help? Their overwhelming response was, “No, it’s not possible,” she says.
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