Listening to Students
HOMELESS
and HUNGRY
in College
I
am a senior at the University of Wisconsin–Madison
who is studying philosophy. I am also a disabled, first-
generation, working-class, and FAFSA-independent
McNair Scholar.
Between 2010 and 2015, I was homeless, and I did not
know where my next meal was coming from. Very few col-
lege administrators, teachers, staff, or students acknowl-
edged these facts or did anything to support me—and I
didn’t know how to ask for help. I didn’t grow up in an
environment that looked favorably on expressing need. I had
been taught that having needs was shameful and that ex-
pressing them signified weakness.
I am not alone. Homelessness and hunger are not new
issues, but most people don’t associate them with college
students, and they are going unrecognized on campus. This
is a growing demographic. We have to identify and empower
students who experience these challenges and help them
come forward to receive assistance so that they can complete
degrees and move on with their lives.
gRoWIng up: Food and HousIng
Hunger is a basic and primal need. My food insecurity
was an unceasing pain flowing from an unmet need that fol-
lowed me for 23 years and follows me still.
I remember my first demerit in elementary school. It was
for taking an unopened box of Hi-C juice from the garbage;
I was trying to put it in my backpack to have later at home. I
was a food-insecure child in a housing-insecure family.
Each day was a crisis: Did Mom pay the bills? Is there
anything for dinner today? Will we be losing our home next
Brooke Evans (brookeaevans@yahoo.com) is a senior at the
University of Wisconsin–Madison.
26
By Brooke A. Evans
week? Should I start packing now, just in case? And this
situation was multi-generational: my mother had been home-
less, and my father—who left when I was six years old—
only completed middle school and continued to struggle
financially as a day laborer all his life.
I was a recipient of free and reduced-price lunch in el-
ementary school. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, school
lunch tickets were either blue or red: blue for normal-kid
lunch, red for poor-kid lunch; red tickets in one line, blue
tickets in another. There was some unwritten rule that kids
with red tickets sat together, and kids with blue tickets sat to-
gether with kids who were eating cold lunch. Cold lunch was
the best. It meant you had food at home and that somebody
loved you enough to pack it for you.
All my life I’ve known that I had less than my peers,
although I am so privileged to be here in America. What I
didn’t realize was how difficult it was for my mother, as a
single, working parent of three who didn’t have an educa-
tion or family support, to access food. She received canned
Cold lunch . . . meant you had
food at home and that somebody
loved you enough to pack it for
you.
Change • January/February 2016
cream-of-mushroom soup and boxed rice or noodles from
our local food pantry. We didn’t eat fresh food.
Back then, two-liter bottles of soda cost 79 cents at our
local gas station. To earn money, my brothers and I did yard
work, cleaned homes, and cared for our elderly neighbors.
With our change, often in quarters or dimes, we could afford
a bottle of Mountain Dew.
I remember being so excited about Sunday School that I
hardly slept on Saturday nights. Sunday School meant coffee
hour afterward, and coffee hour meant cookie hour. I stuffed
my pockets with cookies from church, hoping to save them
for later.
My fear of not knowing when I would see food again
drove me to excess. I was a child who would eat until she
threw up. This was the incubation period of my binge-eating
disorder, which I continue to battle today.
In College: Housing
I became homeless during my first semester of college.
I found out during midterm exams that I would not have a
home to return to over Thanksgiving break, and University
Housing did not offer the option of staying on campus (or an
affordable on-campus housing option either). I did not yet
have a car, so living in one—something I later began to do—
was not a viable alternative.
I found housing through social media, searching through
my old yearbooks and church connections to locate families
or individuals willing to open floor or room space for me. I
lived in basements, garages, storage units; I slept on carpet,
on tile, with and without heat. This was as uncomfortable as
you can imagine, burdening others with my need for shelter,
any shelter. It always led to the same questions, spoken or
unspoken: “Why are you homeless? Why doesn’t your fam-
ily want you? Is there something wrong with you?”
I tried to make ends meet by working three or four jobs
at any given time, balancing them with school and civic
engagements, year-round. I donated plasma twice weekly to
help pay the rent each month; I was also collapsing at least
once a week from doing so. Since I wore the trauma of my
socioeconomic hardship on my sleeve, peers and staff on
campus began to complain that my “stressful disposition”
was infringing on the learning environment of others.
Not recognizing or understanding the source of my hard-
ship led college staff to insist that it must have been a medi-
cal disability and financial illiteracy that rendered me home-
less, hungry, and a burden to the academic community. This
is a common reaction: People around me attributed my so-
cioeconomic circumstance to a disability or personal defect.
This common accompaniment to the college experience—
the hunger and housing insecurity of the lowest-income
students—has long been swept under the rug, attributed to
deviant individual agency instead of real systemic poverty.
Graduating from high school was a huge deal in our fam-
ily, so I began college with absolutely no idea of how uphill
a battle it would be—how ill the challenge of paying for col-
www.changemag.org 27
lege would make me. We go to college to escape cycles of
poverty, desperation, and the struggle for survival, to realize
greater professional aspirations. But imagine fearing that
your basic needs won’t be met while you’re in college.
The cultivation of multiple identities or cultural codes—
fearing hunger and homelessness outside the classroom
while trying to be as ambitious and achievement-oriented as
my food-secure peers inside the classroom—contributed to
a psychological phenomenon I have long combated, known
as “impostor syndrome.” Without a home and without meals,
I felt like an impostor among my brilliant peers. I even felt
like an impostor within my family, whose members did not
have historical academic narratives. I was indeed isolated.
I wore a shroud of shame. I considered it shameful that
when I should have been giving my undivided attention
to the lecturer, I was instead staring at the clock hoping to
make it out of class in time to get in line at the local shelter.
From all angles—academic and personal—I felt ashamed.
In College: Food
I also considered it shameful that I had to worry about
food, all the time. People often picture college students eat-
ing ramen noodle soup and hot dogs. It is true that these
have long been quintessential staples for college freshmen.
When I started college, I lived in a typical dorm—doing so
was required and made possible by student loans—and we
all ate ramen noodles and hot dogs because we were doing
the emblematic college thing: being lazy, eating out of mi-
crowaves and from hot plates.
But what people missed was that semester by semester,
and especially as we transitioned outside of the dorms,
our access to sustenance was more and more segregated.
Students with the option to eat better, did—while the rest
of us who could not afford more were still eating the same
inadequate, low-quality food. It was no longer a “college
phase” that bound all students together; for the lowest-in-
come, it was a nagging reminder of their poverty.
This dietary dichotomy represents a distinction be-
tween food to survive and food to thrive. Only the latter
satisfies the dietary recommendations provided by the US
Without a home and without
meals, I felt like an impostor
among my brilliant peers.
Department of Agriculture. Yet I, and many students like me,
have been surviving on beef- and chicken-ramen noodles for
23 years and counting.
This is food to survive.This is not food you feed a de-
veloping mind; this is not nourishment but merely filler.
Ramen-noodle soup was a reliable trick to quiet my stomach
for the time being. If a diet consisting solely of ramen-noo-
dle and canned cream-of-mushroom soups seems inappropri-
ate, inadequate, or harmful for a child, why do we expect it
to be suitable during the four or more years it takes for adults
to complete a college degree?
Reflection
Investing in knowledge is an expensive pursuit with a de-
layed material return. I thought college would be the answer
to my prayers for food and shelter, but I discovered that
poor children don’t become not-poor adults when they enter
college.
A change in scenery from an elementary school to a col-
lege campus is not a change in socioeconomic circumstance;
a change in scenery is not a change of position in society. A
hungry person is a hungry person, whether they are 12 or 21
years old.
Furthermore, balancing a meagre existence with a crafted
professional identity is exhausting. Even the ability to fo-
cus on the future is a luxury and a skill I am still learning
today, at 23 years old. Here in Wisconsin, our state motto is
“Forward.” But there I was year after year, a Wisconsin na-
tive at the great state University of Wisconsin, feeling abso-
lutely stuck in neutral.
Today
Now, as an undergraduate researcher studying housing
and food insecurity, I read comments made by the public on
articles about food insecurity in higher education. And I see
comments like this: “Kids these days, so entitled, thinking
they deserve to eat more than ramen noodle soup—in my
day, that’s all I ate.”
I was not right when I thought that my hunger and home-
lessness, as well as any expressions of need, were shame-
ful. But I was right when I thought they were considered
shameful. Even when more fortunate people recognize the
problem, the most common reaction is, “It’s not my respon-
sibility.”
Today, I have about $65,000 in
student loan debt affixed to my
back, and I do not yet have a
degree.
28 Change • January/February 2016
What You Can Do: Campus Level
But in fact, colleges and universities can help students like
me. The critical first step is that people in charge must em-
power us to identify ourselves. This requires learning about
and being sensitive to the issues we face.
Please move past outdated conceptions—stop assuming
that if we have ramen noodles (and only ramen nodles), we
aren’t hungry, or that if we’re couch surfing, we aren’t home-
less—these are not adequate ways of meeting basic needs for
food and shelter; these are not sustainable solutions that care
for the whole person behind the “student.”
After all, the rising costs of attending college have exac-
erbated these gaps in meeting basic needs. In addition, the
worry about mounting student loan debt has increased the
strain on already stressed-out students. Today, I have about
$65,000 in student loan debt affixed to my back, and I do not
yet have a degree.
You can also make resources (e.g., food pantries, emergen-
cy housing, affordable campus housing) accessible and visible
to students during orientation and through academic advising,
counseling services, and student-life and diversity offices.
Making sure that faculty are aware of or can access informa-
tion on how to direct housing- and/or food-insecure students
to the right university support services is critical, because
faculty are the most frequent points of contact for students on
campus. The mission here is to support these students.
In fact, the most important support I received came
from Joseph van Oss, a lecturer in the Communications
Department at UW–La Crosse (where I started college). I
took a general education communications course with him,
and he held conferences with each student. We were required
to sit in his office rocking chair and discuss our class perfor-
mance, receive feedback on our completed work, and share
any feelings we had about the course thus far.
This was the only time a professor had created a safe
space like that for me. It was during one of my required
rocking-chair conferences that I broke into tears about my
housing insecurity and the fears of food insecurity that were
dominating my life. Professor van Oss made a point after
that conference to visit me at my jobs just to check in and
make sure I was okay working long hours and completing
coursework.
I gave an informal speech in his class that semester that
involuntarily became a cathartic release of my stress about
socioeconomic hardship. It changed the climate of the class-
room—it was the first time my peers had heard about that
kind of destitution from another student, and the class be-
came a family after that point.
That professor became my biggest advocate, and for five
years he insisted that I seek refuge with his family should
I ever need it. He remains a dear mentor and friend, and he
shares my experience in his course with each new batch
of students, semester after semester. By sharing my story,
Joseph van Oss has even inspired civic engagement across
campus by peers and faculty alike. I’ve learned that simply
sharing an experience—putting a face to the pain—can
change a campus.
 My fellow scholars and I no longer need to work another
20 hours a week on top of our 20- to 40-hour research
loads and our 12- to 18-credit academic schedules.

WHat you Can do: polICy level
We also have to support good policies and change bad
ones at the state and federal level. For example:
A good policy
I am a McNair Scholar, a participant in a federally
funded TRIO program designed to provide opportuni-
ties for the lowest-income and/or disabled students
who are underrepresented in their fields, so that they
can complete undergraduate research and proceed to
graduate school.
Without this program, McNair Scholars would other-
wise be working a full-time job or several part-time
jobs to stay afloat in college. The socioeconomic barri-
er would have kept these students from having the time
required to complete undergraduate research (which
requires a commitment of 20 to 40 hours a week) and
to present that research at national conferences—both
of which are requirements for a competitive applica-
tion to professional school.
A bad policy, changed
Some of us work part-time jobs for <20 hours a week,
which does not meet the government work requirement
of at least 20 hours a week for obtaining food stamps.
Until 2014, if we needed food stamps to survive, we
would have been required to work an additional 20
hours a week. This requirement put McNair Scholars
at risk and at a disadvantage, both academically and
personally.
Last year, I worked with the state of Wisconsin to cre-
ate a precedent case number to inform all case manag-
ers that McNair Scholars satisfy the work requirement
necessary to qualify for FoodShare benefits. My fellow
scholars and I no longer need to work another 20 hours
a week on top of our 20- to 40-hour research loads and
our 12- to 18-credit academic schedules. And all of
us—among the lowest-income students on our cam-
pus—are finally able to eat.
ConClusIon
We can still do more. I support all of the policy recom-
mendations made by Katharine Broton and Sara Goldrick-
Rab in their article in this issue of Change. I am now em-
ployed by the Wisconsin HOPE Lab as a researcher, and I
work tirelessly to help our team make the goal of college
completion a realistic and affordable one for all. C

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