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Social work professor Rashida Crutchfield, well-known for her pathbreaking research exposing the realities of college students living with homelessness and food insecurity, has received new recognition for her service – the prestigious .

As a member of Cal State Long Beach’s faculty, she has influenced several efforts at The Beach and throughout the California State University system to assist students encountering hardships. ����ܳٳ���ھ������’s work has impelled leaders and scholars to confront problems affecting large numbers of students, and to embrace solutions including on-campus food pantries and emergency housing programs.

“Everybody just started moving forward and I’m just proud to be a part of that effort,” Crutchfield said of Cal State Long Beach’s embrace of services meeting students’ needs.

The California State University Board of Trustees will present the awards today. The awards annually honor four faculty members and one staff member selected from the CSU system’s entire roster. Faculty are separately honored for distinct areas of accomplishment. Crutchfield, nominated by President Jane Close Conoley, received Outstanding Faculty Service honors.

“Dr. ����ܳٳ���ھ������’s achievements in service have significantly changed our understanding of some formidable barriers to students’ success, specifically housing and food insecurity and their adverse effects on student learning,” Conoley wrote in her nomination letter. “Her exceptional service has had an impact on the entire campus, across the wider CSU system, and on a variety of external stakeholders.”

Crutchfield is the fifth person from Cal State Long Beach to win the award. Former CSU Trustee Stanley Wang established the award in 1998, while he was still on the board, with a $1 million gift enabling the university system to confer the award for a decade. Wang reestablished the award in 2015, providing an additional $2.5 million two years later.

Advancing awareness of Basic Needs

The Beach’s Basic Needs Program connects students with acute needs to assistance including cash grants, meal assistance and emergency housing. Basic Needs also helps students access longer-term help in the form of public assistance programs.  

Basic Needs also has a research arm, The Center for Equitable Higher Education (CEHE). Crutchfield is its executive director and CEHE coordinates studies of Basic Needs projects, welcoming student researchers and practitioners.

“Our work in CEHE for me is both research and service,” Crutchfield said. “We want to make sure all this good work is reaching the people it’s supposed to reach.”

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One example of CEHE’s work is its ongoing review of College Focused Rapid Rehousing, a pilot program including ��ɫ����. The participating campuses work with nearby housing organizations to provide quick relief to students experiencing tenuous access to housing and full-blown homelessness.

An interim report from CEHE’s three-year study of this program found that over a two-year period ending in August 2022, nearly 360 students at eight CSU and two California Community Colleges campuses accessed new housing through the program. Among them, 57 attended Cal State Long Beach.

����ܳٳ���ھ������’s work for CEHE continues more than a decade of research into student homelessness at ��ɫ����. She earned her Doctor of Education in Educational Leadership from The Beach in 2012 after completing her dissertation entitled, “‘If I Don’t Fight for It, I Have Nothing’: Experiences of Homeless Youth Scaling the Collegiate Mountain.”

����ܳٳ���ھ������’s reputation as an expert in the subject has only grown since then.  

“Dr. Crutchfield has become the campus’ primary contact for information regarding students in crisis due to homelessness and food insecurity,” Conoley wrote.

Statewide impact

����ܳٳ���ھ������’s . She helped lead a study of CSU students’ basic needs that revealed nearly 11% of CSU students experienced homelessness during a 12-month period preceding a January 2018 report. That report, co-authored with Cal Poly Humboldt social work faculty member Jennifer Maguire, also found that nearly 42% of CSU students had experienced food insecurity.

The CSU was already trying to address those problems. ����ܳٳ���ھ������’s initial report in that three-phase study, published in January 2016, motivated CSU’s Basic Needs Initiative increasing students’ access to supportive services.

By February 2018, students at all CSU campuses could obtain nourishment from an on-site food pantry or a food distribution program and use CalFresh benefits at school. Also, all campuses had assigned staff members to be students’ point of contact for basic needs and most had by then established emergency housing programs.

The State Legislature followed ����ܳٳ���ھ������’s call to action in 2021 by appropriating ongoing funding for CSU's Basic Needs Initiative.

Overcoming misconceptions

����ܳٳ���ھ������’s research and academic work follows several years’ experience with community services organizations in Southern California and elsewhere. This work, which followed her earning her undergraduate degree at The Beach in 1997, has helped her to understand the breadth of needs that college students may experience.

For example, Crutchfield served as a volunteer coordinator for Covenant House California, a Hollywood youth shelter, where she had a memorable encounter with a young woman who was trying to enroll in community college while living with homelessness. This client had not received the assistance she needed, having been rebuffed by a financial aid counselor who told the would-be student “she didn’t look homeless.”

“This young woman had temporary stay in shelter, and that meant that she was going to miss an entire semester because ‘she didn’t look homeless,’” Crutchfield said.

The fact that the financial aid counselor in this story lacked understanding of student homelessness doesn’t mean that individual was a bad person, Crutchfield said. But for too long, many people within higher education have not understood that a college student and someone experiencing homelessness can, at times, be the same individual.

Sometimes, these students have grown up in foster homes or neighborhoods affected by community disinvestment. Others have experienced the harms of racism, homophobia and transphobia on the way to college.

Whatever an individual student’s circumstances, the hardships that can lead to student homelessness don’t simply stop at the end of high school, Crutchfield said.  

“It still surprises me how people are surprised,” she said.