[ Music ]
[applause]
>> Thank you all.
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 had recently moved into a new apartment
that overlooked my old college campus.
And I was telling a friend how much I like 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 of my sorority, I served on student government,
I started the school spirit club, school was my life, campus was home.
And when I said 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 I'll never have to leave.
So I did and here I am.
I talk 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.
And it turns out I was not the only one.
It's estimated that there are upwards
of 58,000 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 percent, 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 don'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.
It 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 couch surfing 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
and 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.
It definitely was not my reality.
Sometimes there are no parents, no family, or the family may be 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 of 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.
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, it probably did.
But 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 exist.
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 that 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 campuses.
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, Washtenaw community college and Ozone House recently launched the MORE 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 to 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, don't worry.
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 ]
Thank you.
[applause]