So, I have the honor of introducing us to our moderator:
moderator is gonna come up here and then moderator gonna introduce our closing speakers. Our speakers do have slides.
So, get ready to get some magic on the slides and then they're gonna go into a discussion.
Once they wrap up then we're gonna have Colleen come up here, offer some magic, and then we're gonna wrap this whole thing up together.
That's what we're getting into.
Everybody on the same page? [Claps]
Yes? Okay, beautiful! So here we go.
So, our
moderator's bio is epic!
Luoluo joined the CSU system office as associate vice chancellor for student affairs and enrollment management
last August first
after serving five years as vice president for student affairs and enrollment management and
Title IX coordinator at San Francisco State University.
Shout out to the bay! [Cheers]
With a BA in Psychology from Amherst College,
MPH from Yale University,
and PhD ineducational leadership and research from LSU, Luoluo has given over
3,000 presentations, keynoted noted over
75 conferences and authored a textbook and several book chapters.
Luoluo resides with an orange tabby named
Phoenix and a flame-point siamese named, was it
Daario? At
times she can be found as a LvL 120 Human Warlock in World of Warcraft.
Ladies and gentlemen, Luoluo is here to be our moderator! [Applause]
Aloha Mai Kakou, everyone! [Cheers]
We have the daunting challenge of keeping you alert, alive and engaged after a big meal
so- but I think we are not going to disappoint. So, it is such an honor to be here with you.
I just want to clarify. Yes, that is Daario Naharis
from Game of Thrones
and so- I just wanted to clarify.
Alright
I'm excited because I'm gonna be joined and I'm actually gonna ask my
two colleagues to go ahead and come up and join me. First, is Dr. Rashida
Crutchfield. [Applause]
She is associate professor in the School of Social Work at California State University, Long Beach.
She is an advocate committed to amplifying the voices of marginalized communities through research and service.
Prior to work at CSU Long Beach,
she served on the staff of Covenant House California, a shelter for 18 to 24 year olds experiencing homelessness.
This experience blossomed a love and passion for this population. Her areas of
practice and research focus on student homelessness in higher education,
basic needs security for students, and social work community practice.
She led Phase One of the CSU's Office of the Chancellor's study on Food and Housing
Insecurity and was Co-PI for phases Two and Three of the same study.
Dr. Crutchfield has authored or co-authored many publications including a recent book entitled Addressing Homelessness and Housing Insecurity
in Higher Education:
Strategies for Educational Leaders, which I just bought and is sitting on my desk waiting for me to read and so welcome to Dr. Crutchfield. [Applause]
To her left and your right is Dr. Sumun Pendakur. [Cheers] 
She serves as the chief learning officer and director of the USC Equity Institutes at the USC Race and Equity Center
dedicated to advancing racial justice in higher education and other sectors.
Prior to this position, Sumi held roles as the assistant vice president for diversity and inclusion at
Harvey Mudd College and as the director for USC's Asian Pacific
American Student Services. The body of her scholar practitioner research and work focuses on helping campuses,
nonprofits and other organizations
build capacity for social justice and racial equity.
She is the co-editor with Dr. Sean Harper and Dr. Stephen Kay of Student Engagement in Higher Education:
Theoretical Perspectives and Practical Approaches for Diverse Populations,
the 3rd edition. In
2019, she was named one of the Top 35 Women in Higher Education by Diverse Issues in Higher Education magazine.
Sumi is also the proud and tired mommy to seven-year-old, Shashi and one-year-old, Shama. Welcome to Sumi! [Cheers]
Okay. So, I just wanted to give you all a sense of what we're gonna do this afternoon with you. Each of our two panelists
are gonna spend some time sharing some observations or remarks from their
field of work, in their perspective, and then we're gonna come back together and have a conversation
up here and then invite you to join us at the end. So I guess we'll start with you [Rashida].
I guess that's me, huh? And I think I think I'm gonna stand
and feel the energy in this space, right?
When we did our first
CSU conference in 2016,
Jessica Medina [CSU Fresno] led us, and we had a small band of dedicated volunteers,
were advised by Sabrina Sanders [CSU Chancellor's Office] and
even with the unwavering support of
Chancellor Timothy White. It felt like we were climbing a mountain with dental floss and duct tape; [Laughs]
but now, here we are as a whole family. Like we are family, right? We're here with aunties and uncles
and cousins. Some of whom we knew. Some we're meeting for the first time. Some we didn't know, now
we got DNA and we're family now. 
I'm gonna try not to be that cousin who's wild n' out saying too much all the time.
We'll see how successful I am- [Pendakur: Got to try, girl]. I'ma try
because I'm gonna try to yield and a big part of my remarks to our students' voices.
What I will say is that: I come to this work as mentioned from the
CSU Study on Basic Needs that was a Three Phase study
working with my work-wife Jennifer McGuire
and we came in
2016 from different vantage points.
There were some of us who had some expertise in addressing basic needs.
There were a whole lot of us
who came in the room with open minds and open hearts and a lot of questions. And there definitely
were some folks who came with some strong criticism
really wondering whether or not we had a place or whether there was a place in higher education
to be even talking about basic needs. And now we've done a lot of soul-searching and
a lot of discovery to get to this point where we know we have to, 
we know we have to. In the Third Phase of our study,
we really focused on looking at how students utilize their time and their financial resources.
I'm showing you one chart. I'm an academic.
I'm going to show you one chart- [Laughs] and as my colleague,
Aydin Nazmi, likes to say: charts are the yard signs for academics. [Laughs] So, I have to show you one chart
and this chart just points out that
when we look at all students (the students who are working the most hours and have the highest level of
familial obligation) are our students who are struggling the most
meeting their basic needs.
Struggling the most
meeting their basic needs. So, what this highlights is that our
students are doing everything in their personal power to come to our
institutions to learn, to grow, and to graduate.
Sound? I'm gonna go back. [PPT] We ready? Back it up, back it up... [Laughs]
So, what I'll say here is that- okay. Here we go, one more time.
[Audio File] "Despite of all I'm still happy and I'm grateful to being able to pursue an education.
I know a lot of people can or haven't been able to.
As hard as it is, just the fact that I can eat -- I can still come to college or get some kind of degree
that's still a win-win for me".
Our students coming to us. They come to us in grace and sometimes they come to us frustrated and angry, and
sometimes they come to us in kindness and joy, but really all of that I'm going to say is grace,
right? It manifests differently and sometimes that's frustrating but that's because they're living those frustrations every day.
I hear sometimes we say things like life gets in the way of learning but I'm gonna say that life is
essential to learning and
that if we don't own that
holistic view of our students, we're not educating them.
This next student that we're going to hear from was- [Applause]. Alright...
let the church say, Amen.
Our next student was asked- like he was working a low-income job
well, actually couple in low-income jobs and still working coming to school full-time and he was asked why is he doing it and-
[Audio File] "In a word,
fear...
and at my age, I'm 42, I have about 25 years left before retirement.
If I retire from this job I'll be one of many elderly who is impoverished,
who is unable to effectively care for themselves and it was unable to simply achieve the necessary things of life
for me I
very much feel I'm in a do-or-die situation".
Words are important and I think we get to change how we use this word traditional student,
right? Because we've been using traditional student to talk about the 18 to 24 year old who comes to our institution
relatively resourced. But really we know in the CSU and the community colleges and even in a growing way in the UCs
that our traditional student is over the age of 25,
has children,
may come from a low-income background,
may be
LGBTQI family,
may be undocumented. These are our
traditional students and so we get to choose rather than to specialize in
focusing on our students. We get to permeate our decision-making, our policymaking, and our practice with
institutions that are here to receive them why...
[Audio File] "The goal is to achieve as much as possible academically so that I can achieve something more professionally"
and personally,
right? And personally.
[Audio File] "Saving money for my kids so they don't have to go through this. [chuckles]...
unfortunately I can't change anything about my situation but hopefully I can't change the pattern for the future".
So,
historically the essential ingredients of the recipe of higher education, frankly,
manifested oppression and inequality.
Historically speaking, we know that higher education
was developed to help people who had access to privilege have more access to privilege.
And we're transforming that narrative, but some of those ingredients are still in our systems.
They still manifest in some ways.
So, if we're really going to address equity gaps, we address basic needs,
we address racism,
we address inequity. That is fundamental. [Applause]
[Audio File] "That's how my life has been. I'm very dedicated, I'm very push, push, push...
Was I tired all the time? Heck yeah. I'm still pushing".
So I think this is this is our students, right?
But this is also us because most of us are wearing many, many hats. If you're in this room,
it's like we got 750 people in this room, but we got
7,000 people in this room if we really count all the hats that are represented in this space.
So, our students are push, push, pushing, and we are push, push, pushing
but this is a manifestation of mutual love and help and support. So, 
sometimes I get a lot of credit for the work that I've done and I feel good about it.
My therapy says... therapist says I need to just say thank you rather than no, no but that's my stuff. I'm gonna work on it. [Laughs]
But I have- I do have to be careful not to think of myself as a savior. And
it can be easy when I'm working with marginalized students to think
oh I'm saving people but that's - ooh I was to use my first curse word -
we said we'd have five but that's some shit, right? [Laughs] I can't.
I do my work
to help students because they are helping  me and is that reciprocal relationship that brings us
joy, that brings us community, that brings us love. That's why we're here; it's not an accident, it's on purpose. [Audio File] "I
strongly believe that education is the greatest investment that the society can put upon itself, an
investment in us, which is the future, which is the next generation,
is the most rewarding for an economy, for research, for science, for literature, for culture, the arts,
and for any budget cuts to be coming towards us will dramatically affect us.
They affect our health, they affect our future, they affect our progression out of poverty".
These quotes are from our students in qualitative interviews with them.
Let's take- like... let's take a second and feel that. 
For real.
I know that we are being asked to do more with less.
Like I honor- that's real. We're asking- we're being asked regularly to do more with less,
and we're doing it, and it's hard. It's really hard.
I'm showing you this piece of art. It was done by an Afrofuturist artist named Alicia Wormsley,
who's very well known particularly on the East Coast and she also happens to be my cousin.
So, these folks are matriarchs in my family. And they are singing in my grandmother's backyard. And
singing is something we do in my family:
we sing in the kitchen, we sing in the car,
we yell up and down the stairs, but then we sing in the living room and I am NOT going to sing. 
That's not going to happen.
But I
raise this because I wanna go to that adage that many of us have heard: that a choir is
beautiful and sings beautifully because as one person needs to take a breath,
another person steps in and breathes air into that note. And
some of us are going to go back to our campuses and feel on fire. And
then we'll have our teams together or we'll be by ourselves.
And then it will start to hurt because there are obstacles, and we'll watch the obstacles that our students are facing and there'll be
obstacles in the work that we're doing. But we are here together as this choir,
breathing life into every note.
Connect to each other. Stay with each other. Bridge these gaps. Because that's how we do this work,
that's how we breathe life into each note, and each other
to make a beautiful sound.
Thank you. [Applause]
Good afternoon folks. How are you? Can I get another round of applause for my sister-friend over there? Beautiful.
Just the
idea of us breathing
together and with each other.
Feels like some days a momentous, a momentous act,
because some days we are just holding our breath. Do you ever have days like that?
Your body is tight because you're holding it. So just the opportunity
to exhale collectively, so, thank you for that, Rashida
I'm
incredibly honored to be allowed to be in the space with you at the inaugural CHEBNA Summit. My name is Sumi Pendakur (she/her/hers).
I'm the chief learning officer at the USC Race and Equity Center.
It was
amazing to come into the space today and see so many friends from so many campuses. Want to give a special shout out to
Queena and [Alejandra] from USC. [Cheers] Fight On! Fight On! You have to do it;
it's almost required. 
[Laughs]
Is this slide on? Okay. So, I
titled this and thinking about this being some of the last moments we all have together at CHEBNA 2020.
This idea around the powerful imagination to imagine something more than we have now
and so I titled this Imagining the World Not Materialized and in the few minutes that I have with you,
I'd like to share a couple of thoughts.
First, I want to read a quote to you and as you read it... at the end
you can let me know if you recognize it.
"Today, therefore, the question on the agenda must read: Why should there be hunger and privation in any land, in
any city, at any table when man has the resources and the scientific know-how
to provide all mankind with the basic necessities of life? 
...There is no deficit in human resources; the deficit is in human will.
The time has come for an all-out world war against poverty.
The rich nations must use their vast resources of wealth to develop the underdeveloped, school the unschooled, and feed the unfed.
Ultimately a great nation is a compassionate nation.
No individual or nation can be great if it does not have a concern for "the least of these".
Anyone know whose speech is this? It's not mine.
It's okay. You can say a word.
There you go.
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., this was his Nobel lecture in December of
1964.
So, take a moment just to reflect on what speaks to you from his words,
his prescient and powerful words, from 56 years ago
that maybe hold even more truth today.
So, here we are 56 years later,
collectively, at CHEBNA 2020, and I want to focus my thoughts particularly on this line
"there is no deficit in human resources; the deficit is in human will".
Not the will by the way of people in this room, to be very clear. So,
this is what I'm here to talk about.
This is a quote by one of my favorite historians, Robin Kelly, and he writes "without new visions
we don't know what to build, only what to knock down".
This inaugural summit has been full of best and cutting-edge practices. I told a couple of folks"
I felt lucky to be able to follow along on the Twitter backchannel. So, thanks to all of you, tweeters, in the space,
who gave us an opportunity... when sitting out there, to be able to follow along as best as we could.
Full of best and cutting-edge practices, creative ways to engage in the work of radical incremental change, which is what I saw somebody write about.
But as the summit comes to a close, and you prepare to head back to your campuses and organizations. What are the possibilities? The possibilities
that we take building on these skills
and these knowledges is collectively in the room. To imagine something different. To take the old and new visions,
to build something transgressive.
How many of you've seen this image before or some variation of this image?
Okay. I'd say the vast majority at least eighty percent (80%) of the folks in the room raised their hands if you couldn't see each other across
the room. I
want to actually use this image in a couple different ways for the few minutes we have.
Those
of you who know me: know that my the life's body of my work, approximately twenty years, has been focused on social justice,
community agency building, and on racial justice. And 
to me basic needs and racial justice are twin sides of the same coin. We don't have basic needs without racial justice.
We don't have racial justice without basic needs. In fact, a basic need is racial justice. Let's just name it! [Applause]
And
so, the intersections of our work, although we may approach the question from our own vantage points,
the heart of the work is the same, which is
justice. Justice for more or justice for all. Not in the way that it is currently constructed in this country.
So, what I want to argue, and of course those of you who have not seen the image, it's a it's a powerful one.
There's variations on it... let me unpack it for a moment. It's a way just to describe:
what the difference is between equality, in which, we give people the same resources and actually expect there to be different outcomes without taking into
regard different playing fields... the inequities that people have leading into various systems;
equity is the idea of meeting people where they are concretely understanding what barriers have existed in the past,
what barriers exist in the present context, to meet people and
scaffold their needs to where they are, which is so much of the work you do in this room; and liberation is the possibility of
dismantling it at all. I
would argue, here, that the fence, and we could have different interpretations, but for our conversation today,
I would argue that the fence is capitalism. Which is fiercely linked to racism and imperialism. The
fence is the shame people are made to feel because they are poor, because they are hungry.
The fence, at the federal level, is what causes this
administration to penalize poor people for being poor by cutting Medicaid, by cutting SNAP benefits,
by engaging in humiliating drug testing to access welfare benefits, and more. [Claps]
And we are not exempt in higher education for the way
we manifest this particular type of systemic violence, a very small example, for example, is
the continuation- the expansion of merit aid
when we know the case for need-based aid is clear and would have the highest impact on all marginalized people. And
I know a number of you in the room are working on these policy interventions, at local and at the highest of levels.
So, I speak to you as a colleague on a shared journey not because I have any particular answers.
But instead, we continue in our higher education institutions,
at the CSU's, the community colleges, the UCs, the private institutions
to continue with false narratives around meritocracy as if there was ever a level playing field to begin with.
So, I want to present that as one way for us to describe what liberation looks like, which is with a fierce
critique of the capitalist structure that ends up necessitating something like food banks in the first place.
Food pantries, food banks... they analogue affirmative action-
all of them are band-aids on a broken system that was designed to keep some oppressed while others thrive.
You don't have to agree with me, but they gave me the ten minutes, so. [Laughs] Now
I have two more thoughts here that this picture sparks for me and I'm hoping it's sparking other thoughts for you.
Here today in these last couple days, you've had
750 people who more than most know the landscape of how
dehumanizing our economic system is.
Most of us are one medical emergency away from having our savings wiped out.
My mom went through a two-year battle with cancer this last two years and one of the bills they received was
$42,000 for a necessary test to actually get her gene therapy.
It was a necessary test but then the private insurance company did not want to pay for it. Now, 
my dad has a social and cultural capital to fight it: the language, the time, the skill
to fight, fight, fight and to get that reduced but the panic they felt while also dealing with in health crisis at home is
inhumane. And we have
thousands of stories like that.
The social safety net is rapidly being eroded and we all suffer.
So, to me the third picture represents a Liberatore vision of
housing, food, and health for all of us. Your voices in this room are some of the most powerful
because of the knowledge, experience, and wisdom you hold, and so many of you are already doing this, at the local level and at the
state and national.
I encourage everyone in this room to go big
to advocate, lobby at the state and national level and to use your voice and your particular lens, which again
most people in academia do not have.
You have a massive asset.
Now, I know some days as Rashida was saying it may not feel that way. 
What did you say between floss and  what-? [Rashida and Luoluo: Duct tape.]
Floss and duct tape. 
As you climb that mountain, the Sisyphean task of climbing the mountain, with a rock on your face. I get it.
But
you have this voice because basic needs are just that, basic; they are essential to human functioning.
There should be nothing surprising about this and we should be working to eliminate, at
the end of the day, the band aid of food banks and food pantries. For as essential as they are now,
this would be the Liberatore picture. Now, while we direct some of our energies is thinking about how to get to that third picture,
let's continue to focus on the second picture. I'm a big believer in "ands" not "ors"... "ands not ors";  
we must do both.
So, let me leave you with a couple last thoughts.
There's fences All kinds. In this case,
I was using it as an analogue for capitalism, imperialism and racism. But we have fences in our own environments.
We have fences in our own hearts. We have fences
around with people who we work with, who continue to think
that people should be blamed for the condition that they're in. So, there's work to be done.
So, what is your fence? The fence that you're aiming to tackle when you get back to your environment?
I can't name that for you but all of us see those fences.
So the question[s] I have for you, as we move into closing this CHEBNA
2020 Summit: what are you taking from the summit? What's concrete for you? What
concrete actions
do you take that get you to the second, and then hopefully, the third picture? And
then therefore, if we knock down any of these fences and we build the boxes,
how do we ensure that similar fences in different forms aren't being built?
How do we continue to reduce stigma, increase access, and at the same time, 
eliminate the need for all of this in the first place? All of these can exist.. coexist at the same time.
So, one thing that I want to offer to you,
which has been critical for me in my own journey, is about locating
my own power in a given situation. And I talked about uppercase P and lowercase P power.
Not everyone of us is the key decision-maker, not everyone of us is an institutional president,
not everyone in us has million-dollar budgets. I get that. I would like a million-dollar budget. I'm working it out. [Laughs]
But in the meantime,
every one of us in this room, where we sit, we have power. We have the power of our voice,
we have the power of our decisions, we have the power to influence policy, with the power to shape the material
existences of students, faculty, and staff around us. And
let's be real, this is not just a student issue, right?
Seventy percent (70%) of faculty, today, are non-tenure-track,
making on average
$22,400 dollars
for teaching eight courses a year with no benefits.
We have adjunct faculty
dying...
this is real, dying with no health care because campuses are not paying for them.
This is part of the larger neo-liberal agenda of higher education and how we have turned people into
commodities and our students, faculty, and staff all suffer in those environments.
So, all that to say: using your positional structural and your everyday power in your sphere of influence,
do not despair; do not lose; as long as we know that the struggle for dignity and justice in all of its forms is
truly deeply intersectional; and the work of a lifetime, that it requires strategy, thought,
partnership, and heart, we will persevere, and we will also at the same time, commit to taking care of ourselves
because none of these systems were designed to take care of us.
So, let me close with two less things for you.
The title of this brief talk is: 
Imagining the World Not Yet Materialized.
And this is a quote from Ed Chambers who writes a wonderful book called Roots for Radicals. If you haven't read it, it's wonderful.
"Imagination lets us glimpse a world that has not yet materialized and moved back and forth between what was and what is, and
what is and what might be". And in our struggle for basic needs and for dignity, the power of imagination
to continue to imagination something greater and more beautiful than what currently exists is
something that is powerful for every one of us to hang on to and to remember even in the tough moments.
Leave you with this. [Laughs]
The reason we do our work, the reason we go to our campuses every day. You have- or to your organizations, your
nonprofits- you have something in your mind, maybe it's a personal experience, maybe it's a family member,
maybe it's because the quest for social justice is so deeply burning in your stomach.
These might be your future students. These are my children. Thats' Shama on the left, Shashi on the right. One-year-old Shama,
almost seven-year-old Shashi, who has lost more teeth since that photo. [Laughs]
And I sit with immense privilege, to be able to today guarantee my children food, clothing, shelter,
and so much more. I don't take that lightly,
but that should be all children, all
people.
So, I leave us with that thought, that hope, that quest for the imagination, for the revelatory and
revolutionary imagination, that can continue to guide our work.
I'm deeply inspired to be in community with so many of you, and I thank you for allowing me to share my thoughts with you.
Thank you. [Applause]
Rashida and Sumi, thank you so much for getting our juices - see - 
didn't I say that we were gonna stay awake. Okay. Keep digesting,
both, the food and stomach and food and head now. So, I
so appreciated,
really dominant and both of your remarks was this theme of
addressing the broader picture of social injustice,
marginalization, oppression, and I was wondering if you could speak a little bit
more about that. And Sumi, you in particular, talked about so much of what we're doing is
the band-aid.
So, what are we seeing where campuses are taking the work around
basic needs initiatives and digging deeper to address what I would call the root causes? What are we seeing?
You know, Rashida, I'm particularly interested because, you know, in terms of your inquiry...
what's going on, and Sumi
you've got definitely a national picture. So, both of you, be curious to see how are we expanding this work so it's digging deeper.
Okay. So, I would say. I tell my- I'm a
faculty in Social Work and I'm a macro Social Worker, so I'd like to talk about community organizing policy
and research and practice- and I tell my students we have to do
the broad engagement and the policy while we're doing
the day-to-day work, the micro work, right? So, I tell them if you see me
fall down the stairs don't rush over to me and talk to me about national healthcare. [Laughs]
Give me a band-aid...
and pick me up... and help me off my feet and
then we will both limp to the Capitol and talk about what needs to get done, right?
And so, I see that the work that we're doing
across our segments is and out of community is integrative, right? Like we're working together in many different ways.
Really to getting at some of the root causes- I think that we've seen
state legislature really investing in the work that we're doing,
in some ways and also, we have some mandates that are not funded,
right? So, we had AB 801, which told us we needed to have single points of contact,
right? And so now, we have single points of contact, but many of those single points of contact have, like eight hats,
right? And so, we're figuring out how to really put into place
what we've been tasked to do, and also what we've chosen to do... because lots of us had single point of contacts
before we were told we were supposed to, right?
And we have AB 1228,
that said we need to do priority house- we need to prioritize
housing- for students, who experience homelessness, and some of us are like, okay, but I ain't got no housing, right?
So, what am I supposed to do now? So we are seeing housing getting built, we're seeing housing
or rooms or spaces being used in incredibly creative ways. At the same time,
we are also thinking about, how do we engage in critical practice that acknowledges
marginalization of people. 
So, I'm gonna bring it back to you,
right? But I got lots of things to say. But let's go there, right? Like how how do we acknowledge
race, and class, and and all kinds of
marginalization in higher educaiton? You know,
I don't want to make one key point here. I want to make sure I wasn't misinterpreted, at all.
If I use the word band-aid, by the way, it is not meant to be dismissive or insulting.
This is a band-aid that if it doesn't exist, the body bleeds out.
So, this is a necessary
band-aid. I just - 
because I have watched institutions function in specific ways for so long -  that we see
more and more band-aids without the body ever being healed, truly healed.
That is the twin pieces, right? Together, which I think Rashida as you talk about macro and micro is the pieces
I want to clarify. So, 
number one.
This is such a tough question, and I think some of the research that you and your colleagues have done has just been phenomenal,
right? That in looking at basic needs, that
you've dug down and seeing how the specificities are affecting different communities, right? And that we see that there's, in fact,
greater demand and need in
LGBTQ communities, in foster youth communities, and in student of color communities, particularly black communities as well as undocumented student communities,
right?
So, there's actually
specificities we need to attend to, and so one of the things that I'm always interested in looking at is, how do
campuses and other entities across the nation address the broad
question of basic needs while also attending to the specificity adhere and within?
That we have to be able to think about: well, how does
the
Black trans student, who is currently homeless, what are the specific needs that they may have that may be different than another
student who's accessing the food pantry for different issues, right? And this is tough, right? Because we're talking about specificities,
that means we need to have more voice of the table, we need better information, we need more qualitative data.
That's my bias. I'm a qualitative researcher, but quant school y'all, but qualitative data for the win. [Laughs]
We need more of that specificity, so we can actually get fine-tuned because, again, the macro and micro constantly working together.
I think one of the challenges that they see, though, on college campuses across the country, from from the work that I'm doing, is
that people approach - and I'm talking about campus leadership of all types - approach the work in piecemeal fashion,
where there's not the strategic underpinning linking basic needs, in fact, to campus climate, to student retention, to
graduation in some really
necessarily coherent ways, right? So that basic needs ends up over here, but campus climate and racial justice is over here,
but as I said right at the top, they're actually linked issues.
So, I think if there's one thing I could say for...
around this issue is, how do we better inform campus leadership? Again with the expertise that's in this room to say, in
fact, these issues are so closely overlapped that we can't develop, let's say a campus strategic DEI plan without
embedding basic needs in there. Does that make sense? Yeah, absolutely. Sumi, 
I can't agree with you enough on that, and I think it's Richard Keeling, who has
reminded us in higher education, that the way we define health is really important.
So, often it's about the clinical state of being healthy or not healthy, and whether or not there is or is not a
diagnosis. And there's some sense of there's a
continuum,
but really when it comes down to it: health is important in higher education because it's a
capacity. And if you're not healthy,
you can't show up as a student or as an employee or whatever it is that you need to be
when you show up on campus or in your organization.
So, in that, it really the implication ought to be, that it's the work of everyone. But you're right, so often, you know
I think how many of you in this room feel like in some ways you might be doing the work in isolation.
And I also want to second it's a "both/and", and I will say, I'm a recovering Title IX Coordinator,
which in and of itself is a different kind of traumatization. [Laughs]
And I think what I would say is, safety is another basic need. Which we don't often frame it in that way
but if you don't feel safe, that's a very core need that isn't getting met to be able to be a student.
But I think, I've done so much thinking about this because I feel like in many ways
what happened with Title IX is that we're doing the band-aids and those band-aids are essential.
We must have confidential victim advocates to respond to our complainants as they come forward.
We must have all the full array of intervention, programs and services.
But what I'm seeing is that's the bulk of where we are investing, if we are
investing. And I'm not sure that we've really got a handle on the true prevention - and I mean more than just bystander - 
I mean that dig deep, really rip it up, a new vision, true liberation
that's really breaking down the social and cultural norms that undergird why
we need Title IX in the first place. And my concern is, it serves
patriarchy and white
supremacy to have Title IX, in some ways, because we get
focused on the band-aid and we don't ever get to the root causes. And I'll be honest,
I'm very easily prone to conspiracy theories. [Laughs] And my concern is that there's still a bulk of policy
decision-making - with all appreciation for the support that we have gotten in higher education - and a
concern that the emphasis is still on the band-aid, which keeps us distracted and away from being able to dig deeper and come together...
right, around that broader work.
I mean
we're in a place where it's almost like we're fighting for resources - a great way to divide and conquer. And so, 
how do we keep that, again, that "both/and" focus, and that's I think where my fear is
but I think you're right and bringing that connection and bringing attention to graduation.
I think is one way to do that and partnering with the folks on campus who are doing the diversity, equity, inclusion,
anti-oppression,
anti-marginalization work would be would be key. And to be explicit in our language, right? 
To be race forward and class forward- [Luoluo: Yes.] in our language- [Luoluo: Yes.]
to use the words that matter so that this doesn't become
coded language that masks the
specificities within. [Luoluo: Yeah.]
So, this is a question that I get often times - as I'm talking with faculty and staff on college campuses...
I don't- well, I don't know it may not emerge for those of you in this group as the practitioners with it,
but you may work with others who are getting this, and the common question I have... is this a new 
phenomenon... this idea... right, is this new when I was in college?
So, I think I want to give a little bit of airtime to that because I you know
this is, again, taking back and I think for some of us, how do you respond? Some of us are just like, really?
What are you asking, right? So, I think some language to go back is: how do you see this fitting?
And I love the quote about looking back and looking now, and then looking now and looking ahead.
So, if we were to look at that time continuum: what is happening?
Is this an old phenomenon but with new challenges? Or is it, in fact, something new and different?
Just curious... the perspectives here on that, so we can go back with some some capacity to respond.
Yeah. I feel like lots of folks have heard me say this so but I'm gonna say it yet again,
I like to say that higher education
discovered basic needs insecurities like Columbus discovered America. [Laughs]
I love it. Borrowing that.
Right? Like I mean, there were folks here. We lived here, right? There... this
ain't new,
right? Many of us live this. Have been living this for a long time.
I
really feel like - as
dear friend Shahera Hyatt would say - I feel like that's a really shallow understanding of what's happening with our students.
That...
let's say in college I didn't have a whole lot, but I didn't suffer. And when I went to college,
sometimes, I had an emergency where I would spend out my money. That I had- didn't have a lot of money
but I spend it out in bad decision making and and then I had a cup of noodles.
But our students aren't making bad decisions.
One of the questions that we asked in our survey was purposeful and was insulting for many of our students.
We asked them like what's going on with your money and we gave them a list of
options, and one of the options was: are you confused about your budget, are you overspending?
And we got phone calls, like, are you freaking kidding me, right?
Because, what they said was... some of them said: yeah, I
need
to learn more about budgeting. And I'm gonna say that I
need to learn more about budgeting. [Laughs]
But really our students said: I don't have money because there is no money. I
cannot learn to budget, what I do not have.
And I think, we definitely wanna have
financial literacy for all of us. Because I'm not sure how
I am all the time, right?
But, I think sometimes when we start talking about financial literacy for our students - and like - I
struggled, so you'll struggle - like Chant'e Catt [Humboldt State University] said yesterday, like that institutional hazing,
like I struggled, so you have to struggle. We gotta call BS on that, right? [Comment from the audience]
You're welcome, darling.
Because if
when we start talking about financial literacy, we're blaming the victim... we're putting the onus on the students to make
gold out of hay. And
so, we have to have more. We have to really advocate
for an investment in our future. And right now, we can't ask the federal government for nothing. So,
we have to make real good choices this year, so we have a government that we can ask for something,
right? Like we got work to do on the ground and above and
reframing our narratives.
Well, there's
two points that it's springing to me from what you just said, Rashida, and from your question Luoluo. 
One is, you know, I mentioned the forms of neo-liberalism in our higher education institutions and
financial literacy workshops are a great example.
Mentoring programs that are designed to facilitate retention are a great example. This is not me saying those programs are bad,
I have run many of those kinds of programs.
Those programs are necessary. And again,
if depending on how they're constructed: they could be constructed as
Liberatore, they could be constructed as rejuvenating, they could also be constructed, in deficit minded ways, right, in which, again- 
[Luoluo: they don't know how to manage their budget. Let's just fix it that way.] They don't. Just fix it, let's fix it, right?
Let's fix them, which is the heart of deficit mindedness is,
that
the burden is on the student, or the poor person, or the queer person, or the trans person, or the disabled person to fix
themselves
rather than the structures around them. Which are what needs to be fixed,
which is what equity mindedness is, right? That we look at
the individuals in our institutions, meaning staff, faculty, administrators and the institution itself and see how we change around that.
So that's number one.
In
our design work, we have to make sure that we don't end up
reinforcing a deficit mindset around the very students we seek to help and support.
But then the other thing is this point because I was thinking about this. My brother is a dean of students at Cornell University, and
they were making some big strides in
advancing some of the work for their first generation college students. And he had some angry alums write to him
say: I was a first generation student - 
you can imagine who this alum - I was a first generation student, I didn't get any special programs and I did fine.
To which my brother wrote back, you know, an excellent response
explaining: number one, conditions were different, number two, the pressures on students today are different, number three,
sir, you couldn't have gotten into Cornell, today. [Laughs]
He said it real nice, though. He said it real nice... because we don't have tenure. [Luoluo: Cuz, he don't have tenure.] Girl. [Laughs]
And third, that particularly post
2008 and 2012,
the impact on so many families that first generation status is not just first generation status.
It could represent the loss of everything. The number of students I've worked with who've had their families foreclosed and have lost
everything. How many of you have had this experience working with students who've gone through the exact same thing? It is
mind-blowing, heartbreaking. And that's not to say that those things didn't happen in the past,
but at the sheer scale of devastation that they've occurred, and again,
with the racial impact, because again black families got foreclosed on at a much higher rate than white families, right?
So again, having to name the specificities there. That this piece about,
well, we made it why can't you is actually the wrong tack, right? It's saying
great, I'm glad you made it. What if these supports had been there for you?
What struggles maybe you didn't have to experience that you've somehow taken on as grit,
which you didn't have to be so damn greedy,
right? Because the
goal of life is, hopefully, fullness and humanity, and joy and living to the best of our capacities,
but if we're so focused on grit, then what are we doing?
And so this piece about, I want to flip that narrative on its head and say to anyone that we know that we work with,
whether they're policymakers or people people that we know, who say: well I did it
why can't you across any issue is, well if you could have done it differently wouldn't you have, right? I
call on Jessica Bartholow, who said yesterday: it's like I made it now,
I'm gonna pull the bridge up behind me, right? And 
jump and go, 
and things have changed dramatically.
You said it yourself, Rashida, is that you know when colleges and universities
first got founded, who they were intended for is so not who is in college now. And increasingly in the
coming decades and years is so going to be different.
So, I think applying a narrative or framework from the past, actually, is utterly inappropriate. And
you know, someone you were talking about the deficit theory. Well, let's just be honest:
how often do we do that in all aspects of higher education and student success, right? The students [aren't] doing well. Well, 
they aren't going to their advisors. Or my favorite is, they're going but they're not listening to what their advisor said, right?
So, there's always some variation of how the student could have done better. And you know, I'm reminded of
Dr. McNair and colleagues wrote a book that just came out, I think in the last two years, about how to become a student-ready
college. And I would say for any one of us in this room doing this work, it applies.
It's not specific to basic needs initiatives
but it's about how will we reconstruct
curriculum, co-curriculum, all aspects of the university to reflect that
we have a different student community; and trying to apply frameworks from the past, actually, are not only irrelevant,
they're irresponsible. [Sumi: And harmful] And very, very harmful.
And I think it's why we're having challenges with some of the outcomes that we're seeing.
So, I am mindful. First of all, this has just been great.
So I... we wanted to make sure that there was an opportunity - 
we have just about five minutes - and I just do want to close it out before we end, but are there any sort of
burning - 
let's leave it at comments right now because I'm not sure we have quality time for two questions,
but if there's any comments to maybe add
briefly. I want to expand the airtime for as many people. I have a big, gigantic bright light in my face...
so, I just want to clarify I can't see very well unless I turn to my left.
Okay, Ruben might be able to see more. And if not, we're just going to keep going so.
Okay. I like to breathe and open the wine bottle and take the cork out and let it... okay. But... okay. 
We're just... okay. So, we'll kind of keep going.
So, in the last minutes that that we have, I wanted to share... I pulled this out
and again it's interesting. We had... we prepare briefly, right? Together, before, but didn't actually share our notes for today,
and I think it's the serendipity of where we all landed.
So, I pulled out Adams, Bell, Griffin, their 2007 definition of social justice. How many know that definition?
Okay, let me share it! Because I think it's so apropos to what we're talking about.
So, I'm gonna just kind of paraphrase instead of reading the whole couple paragraphs.
So, they talk about social justice as being both a process and
a goal to achieve. So, I want to emphasize, it's a process and a goal, right? We keep going. It's really a vision.
It's out there. We look at the horizon. There's social justice over there but we're never ever quite there.
So, be wary of people who believe they are already there.
It is about achieving the full and equal participation of all groups in a society that is mutually
shaped to meet their needs.
Mutually shaped to meet their needs. Not at the convenience for those of us who are the administrators, faculty, and staff. [Cheers]
Equitable distribution of resources,
okay? And we kind of had a picture of that. But you know, equitable I think defining the full volume of what that means. It
is a vision for all individuals to be physically and psychologically safe. Physically and psychologically safe. To be
self-determining and independent. You know we were talking briefly at lunch,
it is truly a privilege to have food security.
I can choose what I eat, including if I want to eat junk; and both the carrot cake and the chocolate, whatever that was,
right? That's that's food security, right? And so, when we address hunger on our campuses,
we're not addressing self-autonomy or self direction. Let's keep that in mind, right? And so
be
self-determining and interdependent. We... I loved your remarks about we're in a community together.
Both of you talked about this, that we've got to do this together and pull folks into the work.
We can't do it alone. And then finally it's a vision about each of us having a sense of our own
agency as well as our social responsibility toward and with others in a community and global society.
I want us to think about: what hunger and homelessness looks like in another country other than ours,
right? And that some of our students come from
some of those other parts of the world, and how does that show up for us?
So, I wanted to bring that because to me, I think our basic needs work -
I thought of this in our Title IX work - this is social justice work.
So, I think in our closing comments,
I want to ask, both, Rashida and Sumi to share their final thoughts with all of you as you go back, and in particular
navigating this "both/and", right? How do we do the band-aid and do the bigger work?
How do we live and and acknowledge we live in a democracy and capitalistic 
society? And that interesting that they're both in together and and also have to be
embracing humanity.
That's a succinct question. [Rashida: 30 seconds because I know you can bring it.] Okay, let's think.
I
think, very briefly, I'll say: I think I'll reflect back on what I closed with, which is that
every single one of us has to have a
deeply, personal reason
to get up every day and want to do this work.
It is the work of a lifetime and probably multiple lifetimes if we want
no child to feel
shame for being hungry.
And
that fire
that every one of you in the room
has and that I share with you, it's a fire that can also be easily quenched if we are not constantly giving it
beautiful kindling. The kindling of community, the kindling of self-care,
the kindling of
savoring the small victories when they come.
The revolution might be tomorrow
but today there might be something good that happened
and we have to be able to name it and own it because it is so easy to sort of,
oh yeah that good thing happened and we just move it aside. You,
as a human being, you and your teams sit down and own it.
Own it for what it is. But it is the thing that gets us up the next day to keep fighting,
because when the tidal wave seems overwhelming, we're gonna need our inner strength to keep on pushing.
I'll leave it at that. Yeah. I will just double down on that and say I think
we are learning.
I think, we we already knew that we were working in silos and needed to come across those silos. I think
you know there are faculty who
doing research, and staff and administrators who are doing the work. And I know, I'm faculty. I know we're annoying. I know we are. [Laughs]
You know, we come in like I'm smartest person in the room [and]
I'm gonna tell you what to do and then you gonna have to go do it, right? That's... and so,
we as faculty, get to really recognize
the privileged status that we have, and shut the hell up, and listen, and then do the work together,
right? Like, we we are in this
saddle, together, and sometimes we bump and jump off or get pushed off,
but we get to pull each other back up and do the work. And
you know, I know, that we have - sometimes these
moments of
calapatition between
campuses and between institutions, right? Like we're going to collaborate but don't take my shit, right?
And so, we get to really see it,
name it, and work together, nonetheless. I was...
we were talking last night, and we were talking about how
this work that we're doing is so unique. Ruben was saying: it's so unique where
campuses come together,
let alone
segments, and like build this much love in a room. We have this now. Like,
my back regularly goes out.
And it went out like in my... when I was 20. Like, I'd be wiped out for a couple days... I'd be fine.
In my forties, I called my doctor; I'm like, it's been six weeks. I'm still out, what's happening...
what are you gonna do? And he says: no, you have that now,
right? [Laughs] Like, 
that's it! You have that now, right?
I'm like oh damn, right? See, I took up all the curse words.
But look here. We have this now. [Applause]
We have this
now. So, when it gets... when your back hurts,
call a sister, right? Because we have this. We have each other now. That's how we do this work.
Help me. So, in native Hawaiian Mahalo Nui Lua,
it doesn't quite translate, perfectly, but just the idea of deep heartfelt, genuine thanks. From the bottom of my heart,
help me show Mahalo Nui Lua to, both, Rashida and to Sumi. [Applause]
