Signs of Progress

My friend/associate dean/partner Mandy likes to remind me that truly having a purpose is rare and people crave purpose. She and I argue over nearly every work topic possible, but she is 100% right on this one. Last June, I challenged my team (and by extension my college) to turn toward students in poverty in a focused, determined, and poverty informed manner. I challenged them to not settle for half-measures and to fearlessly search for barriers to student success so we could remove those barriers at every opportunity. In fact, that became our mantra, Every Barrier That Can Be Removed, Should Be Removed. In June, I spent time in public and private forums making the case doing this work was not just correct, it was smart. I made the case figuring out how to serve students with the most daunting barriers wasn't just a moral crusade, but would in fact teach us how to improve in ways we hadn't really considered. Our students with barriers teach us in ways students with more advantages never could. Our purpose was clear. Would people be drawn to it? Would it make a difference? The answer to both questions is a resounding yes! Let me share a few indicators.

Jessica and Karen

A million little things have happened that show people are drawn to purpose and want to be cause driven. In just the last semester, one of my office staff (a couple of those rock stars are pictured to the left) purchased scrubs for a student who couldn't afford them after overhearing a conversation in our lobby. When I told her that was way above and beyond, she said she felt compelled because it was a barrier she could remove. One of our faculty learned in a conversation with a student that he was sleeping in his car while pursuing a degree full-time. She spent the day working with him and ended up accompanying him to the local shelter to make sure he could get a bed. She didn't know he'd been turned away before, and I have to believe her presence and title helped him get what he needed. Dr. Donna Beegle tells us using our titles and authority to advocate for people in poverty can be a powerful tool on an individual level, and I was pleased to see that in action. Our commitment to our purpose continued to show when another student found out he owed fines and was going to have to sit in jail because he couldn't afford to pay them. The counselor in our area, along with a teacher's aide, couldn't stand to see success interrupted for what essentially felt like debtor's prison, so they organized a collection across the division and enabled the student to continue chasing his dreams. Our Board Chair broached the idea of "safe parking' for students sheltering in cars and our Vice President of Finance specifically mentioned Poverty Informed Practice as a type of first choice service at our all-college day last week. I'd say the jury is in, purpose draws passion.

Dan

Beyond the little things, there are system indicators our movement is taking hold. The biggest one is enrollment. We stripped away an entire level of developmental coursework this academic year and by all logic our enrollment should be down. It's not, not even close... Our summer term was up by 30 percent and our fall term will have a double figure increase when all is said and done as well. One semester could be an anomaly, two in a row feels like evidence. Our efforts to meet basic needs, create belonging, and accelerate progress are drawing and retaining students. Like I said, these students solve our issues internally and externally. Internally, they strengthen our enrollment, and when we retain and graduate them, we meet workforce needs for employers strained by 3% unemployment rates. Winning! Another systemic indicator happened last week when a group of faculty met to discuss a textbook change, and the first consideration was how to teach the course with Open Educational Resources. I'm pleased to say they eliminated the textbook and the burden for students a textbook brings. There are many other indicators, but let me share two more from last week. Our Sustainability Coordinator wants to meet to discuss how we can partner because the impact of the issues he addresses will hit the poor first. And last, our Director of Enterprise Services along with our Food Service Manager, Community Engagement Coordinator, and Student Life Coordinator devised a way to let students with a meal plan support students who are struggling with food insecurity. This last one is extra meaningful to me for two reasons. The first is because my friend Dan, the Director of Enterprise Services, said something like "oh geez, I suppose we will be in your blog now won't we..." at the end of the meeting. His picture is above... You're welcome Dan:). The second is because this partnership shows us at our best. Dan is my friend, but I can almost guarantee we have rarely checked the same names on a ballot. Our partnership shows poverty and helping students is a purpose which unites us, no matter our personal and political persuasions.

One of the great concrete indicators of staff being drawn to purpose is The Bowl, a simple bowl of snacks in our lobby which creates community and provides the ability to go to class without an empty stomach. I've written about The Bowl more than once (read one story here), but the power of this simple concrete action continues to astound me. We fill The Bowl

The Bowl

roughly five times a day, which means we go through a lot of snacks. When we started doing this we committed to the idea of no rationing and no monitoring or judging of what people take. The Bowl is stocked almost entirely through donations. The donations started internally as a few of us are regular weekend shoppers who add to our stash and some folks drop off things on random mornings. Then we started to receive gifts of cash and food from readers of these articles, which was humbling. We also have had staff from across the college make contributions including one whose wife goes every other week for a giant box of granola bars because she wants to help. It's beyond moving, and recently we've received anonymous cash donations of $500 and $1000 respectively. I can't count how many times I've been told The Bowl isn't sustainable. Purpose is sustainable.

Our commitment to Poverty Informed Practice is about leveling the playing field and changing outcomes for students in poverty. But it is also about giving voice to people who have had to stand at the back of the line and hope their needs get met. So let me finish by telling you about a couple of those amazing folks. My friend Emmie (pictured to the right)

Emmie and the author

just started her second semester pursuing her dream of a business management degree. Her situation and story haven't gotten simpler (Emmie's story), but she perseveres. A sixth grade class in Missouri watched Emmie's YouTube video, and it moved one of the students to share with the class that her family had struggled with homelessness as well. Emmie is an inspiration, so we were all thrilled when she emailed us the other day to tell us she had received a scholarship to help pay for her degree. She thanked us for letting the college be her safe place and said the scholarship showed her she was doing the right thing. The other person that came to mind today was Andrea

Andrea

(pictured above on the left with some of her support team. (Andrea's story) Andrea was recently asked by our College's leadership team to accompany them to Washington DC in February to speak with legislators about the value of a technical college education. It's a remarkable honor for a remarkable woman. We are beyond proud to be part of her #RealCollege story. There are so many student stories, and I wish I could share them all. But, let's stop here for now and recognize when things seem overwhelming and progress is hard to find, there are signs of progress everywhere. Purpose is powerful, it truly is, and our students teach us about our purpose every single day.

It's Not Fair

I had an entirely different article in mind for this week. I was going to share some of the signs that our movement is taking hold on our campus, and there are so many, but they will have to wait. I knew that CBS Sunday Morning was going to highlight the issue of homelessness on campus, but I didn't know my reaction would be so visceral. (Watch here) The video is amazing and features students overcoming circumstances most of us couldn't comprehend. Sara Goldrick-Rab was featured, and I was grateful that she continues to shine a light on this issue, but mostly I was just angry and sad. Mostly, I was struck by how unfair things are, and I am afraid we will celebrate the heroism of these students (and they are incredible), rather than the insanity of the situation they are in even existing. Let me try to explain.

I graduated from High School in 1988 (That's me with my grandparents below), and I earned my bachelor's degree in 2000. That's correct, it was a 12 year process to get a college diploma. It's a long story that starts at UW-Madison, detours to UW-La Crosse, involves some time wandering the desert (metaphorically), and ends at Winona State University. I don't have a clear story to explain why my path was so crooked and really it doesn't matter. It was all tied up in a giant undiagnosed anxiety disorder, some post-traumatic stress, and my own failings, but what is more interesting to me today is how I was allowed to work through it, and the contrast of those who don't get the same accommodations through an accident of birth. My grandparents (on dad's side) had dropped out of high school as teen parents and worked their way out of generational poverty to the working class. My parents both had worked through some stuff (Mom's story) (Dad's story), but by the time I was off to college, Dad was almost a decade away from a felony conviction and Mom was having a good career (although in an abusive relationship and struggling with addiction). I'm not sharing these personal things to be titillating but to make the point that even in less than perfect circumstances, I had access to things that any of the students we saw on TV this morning should have the equivalent of.

Class of '88

I moved into my Dad's basement at age 21, my Mom's basement at 22, again at 24, and for the last time at 27. All those returns were lined up with bumps in the road that had knocked me off course for a while. Before that last return to school at age 27, I had to deal with default on student loans, non-existent credit, being academically suspended (a couple of times), and deceiving people about all of the above, but I had advantages to overcome those things, and I didn't see those advantages in the video today. I check a whole bunch of privilege boxes and I fully acknowledge my privilege is one of the reasons I was allowed second (and third) chances. But I also had support, which created hope, and hope is a real thing. I had people who would put a roof over my head when I needed one and made sure my belly was full while I retreated and regrouped. They were far from perfect (as was I), but what an amazing asset and I didn't do anything to "earn" it other than being born in the right time and place. Today I was so angry at the contrast between my experience and the ones I saw on TV. How do we know their reality and not do things radically differently? We cannot require heroism to get what you need. We cannot sell education as a strategy to escape poverty and allow these barriers to exist. I was reminded of a great quote from an article I read last year about Hazim Hardeman, a student who came from poverty and became a Rhodes Scholar (Hazim's story). In the middle of the article, Hazim said the most powerful thing. Instead of being addicted to a Horatio Alger myth which probably never existed he reminded us, “Don’t be happy for me that I overcame these barriers, be mad as hell that they exist in the first place.”

Mad as hell is exactly how I felt this morning as I watched a young woman who made it through college living in a van. I thought of the young man I met on the street near my campus last fall. I had introduced myself and was trying to offer some help to those living outdoors, and as I started to suggest perhaps coming to school, he told me he did go to school, at my college, in my division. Sort of like when you buy a new car and you suddenly notice the make and model everywhere, my eyes were opened. I started to meet students doing amazing things while living in cars, shelters, or on the street. I've written about some of them (Andrea) (Sarah) (Emmie), and while they have had some success, I am just as struck by the fact that we can't celebrate their accomplishments without simultaneously acknowledging we have to do more to give them some margin for error. We know the outcomes for students who don't get support for basic needs. We KNOW the stories we heard today are exceptions, and if we don't start knocking down life barriers, we will leave an infinite pool of untapped potential in shelters, storefronts and vehicles. It is simply not acceptable.

So today, I was reminded our poverty informed work is to see if we can make things fair. Creating fairness takes on all kinds of forms. Fairness is knowing and creating resources that meet basic needs. For heaven's sake we cannot celebrate skipping meals and couch surfing as something we expect of students. Fairness is a poverty informed approach which honors student strengths from the moment they arrive on campus and creates a sense of belonging at every...single...opportunity, with intention. Fairness is a poverty informed classroom which meets students where they are and contains flexibility because their lives and circumstances require it. Fairness means we don't require heroism and endless gratitude to get the things people like me received because of a twist of fate. One of my friends on campus would remind me I might really be talking about equity, and that is true. But today, fairness seems like the right word. In a past life I taught second grade, and no one is more tuned into what is fair and what is not than a seven-year-old. Seven-year-old children get angry when things are unfair and today I am angry. It feels like angry might be the right emotion for now. Anger at unfairness is a great way to keep these issues at the forefront and not retreat to places of emotional safety. So let's love the students we have (credit to my friends at Amarillo College:)), but let's stay a little angry too, so we don't forget.

A Long Obedience

"For anything to be really amazing, there has to be a long obedience in the same direction." Sometimes I turn to the great philosophers, and sometimes I just turn to Bono:). Several years ago, I was addicted to a show on the Sundance Channel called Spectacle with Elvis Costello. It was a great show where Elvis interviewed and performed with amazing musicians, and that week was Bono and The Edge from U2. The music was fun, but they also spent time in conversation, and when the topic turned to Bono's social activism, his response has stuck with me since 2010 when I heard it. He said, "For anything to be really amazing, there has to be a long obedience in the same direction." I'm not sure he even was addressing what I thought, but the phrase really hit home. He referenced the philosopher Nietzsche and the internet tells me that he was paraphrasing a much longer quote, but I love the sentiment. Nothing amazing happens unless we find our north star and stick to it relentlessly. Let me give you a few examples.



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I had an interesting exchange with a coworker this week. She was lamenting that the college didn't want to financially support her efforts to provide food in her area and asked me about ours. I told her I simply went shopping every Sunday, and over time, we had a number of people who donate to "The Bowl." (More about The Bowl) Her response was "that's not sustainable." I wish I'd been more More here) and that seemed to matter. A long obedience in a direction yields results. Initially The Bowl was just a personal reaction to hearing a student say he didn't want a classroom snack because he'd trained his body not to eat and was worth some personal expense (for me and others). Over time, it became a concrete thing people could do and people from across the college began to supply it as well. We go through 4-5 bowls of snacks a day, and it has been truly a culture changer. Someone challenged me just buying food was easy and maybe let people off the hook, but I disagree, it is another step in our long obedience.
reflective when I said "I've been sustaining it for 9 months..." Because what I really meant was questions of sustainability weren't going to stop me from this thing that seemed necessary. We had declared The Bowl as sort of act of faith (

Our work has not been without internal strife. As we try to move from philosophical ideas to concrete action, it can get uncomfortable. Meetings can put us in difficult places, and we don't always agree on exactly what to do. But there are signs of hope and progress everywhere. No one will take credit for

it, but a few weeks ago, a printout of an amazing tweet from Dr. Donna Beegle mysteriously appeared above our copy machine, in a space where we would need to see it every day. I don't know for sure, but I think it was in response to one of those difficult meetings and a feeling of frustration. As we move in the same direction, one of our guiding principles is empathy (not sympathy) and an absence of judgment. Whoever made the choice to put this in our daily view understands this, and I was inspired. A long obedience in the same direction won't always be linear or smooth, but this daily reminder keeps me (and I suspect others) on track.

Speaking of empathy, it is essential in work like this. And while the topic of proximity is probably worthy of an individual write up, I'd still like to touch on it today. If I were designing a poverty informed division/college/anything from scratch, I would make sure no one had a job that didn't include contact with students. It is far too easy to use that distance to see the people you serve as "other." Honestly, of all the work we are doing, changing that dynamic would be the first and most fundamental thing I would do if I had a magic wand. In the last year, I have made a concerted personal effort to personally connect with students. Some of my faculty make fun of me (in a good natured way) for talking about the same three students all the time, but it has been transforming. No longer is there an ability to fall back on administrative platitudes about being patient and trying to make sure we have systems in place before we make changes. Of course, we try to avoid unintended consequences, but I don't believe we have the luxury of waiting to have things perfected. If you doubt this, take a look at the recent GAO report (Kudos to the amazing Sara Goldrick-Rab for her long obedience to getting the federal government aware of reality) referenced in this article from The Atlantic: Millions of College Students Are Going Hungry. When you know the truth, and you stay connected with students and feel empathy, your tolerance for incremental change gets pretty low.

We are not in pursuit of half measures, we are in pursuit of something amazing. We are committed to a bias for action and for fighting on the dual fronts of alleviating conditions today and changing systems, so those conditions go away. Our commitment to being poverty informed means we won't allow our students to be strangers who may or may not be "ready" to access what we have to offer. Instead, they become partners who we work with relentlessly and unconditionally as they pursue their dreams. We sit beside them and realize their situation could be ours, but for an accident of birth or twist of fate. With that reality in mind, it becomes intolerable to leave all that potential sleeping in storefronts and in cars. It becomes intolerable to think the student in front of you might not have eaten today. It becomes impossible to send someone away until they are "ready." When you reach a place like that in your heart, the direction becomes clear. And the long obedience in that direction continues.

Confronting the Brutal Facts

I have worked in Higher Education since 2002. I have been an administrator since 2003 and dean 

since 2008. I'm sharing not just to point out my advancing age, but to start making a point. The point is it's been interesting to have people ask me in the last year questions like "why do you seem different now?" Poverty has been my topic of choice for most of my career, so I was a little taken aback by the question. But it has been different in 2018 as we have tried to move to concrete action from our ideas.The other point I'm trying to make about my long tenure is it can lead to struggling to see your environment for what it really is. You live in it for so long, and you get invested in what you've been doing for years. I think my economics classes in college referred to those as sunk costs, and maybe the change in me is that I stopped chasing them. That started with what the author Jim Collins called "confronting the brutal facts" in his book Good to Great.

"You absolutely cannot make a series of good decisions without first confronting the brutal facts" 30% was the first brutal fact I had to confront.

The Community College Research Center tweeted out the stats pictured here. My team and I worked our tails off and took pride in offering great developmental education courses, but here was pretty incontrovertible evidence showing the work to be kind of futile. I knew the attrition rates in those courses as well as the pass rates. One of our measures of success is moving students onto credit coursework and here was research saying, just skipping us was about as effective. That was a brutal fact. How do you deal with the fact this work you take such pride in and work so hard at, really doesn't work? In your 16th year (if you're me) you have to accept that your foundational beliefs are false...

Admitting you have a problem is a first step, and I had admitted mine. That started to change things. The next brutal fact I had to confront was there was an ethos in working with students in poverty that they should be grateful for whatever they got. It's hard to think maybe I even participated in it at some level. I've talked before about building systems of help that in reality were coercive (my mistake) and actually the opposite of poverty informed. When you see that people are conditional about who they want to help, you can't unsee it. I've heard people who need help referred to as "good bets" or "bad bets" which is pretty darn dehumanizing when you think about it, even just for a second. I hear criticism people don't behave the way we expect. Well that's from our context not theirs, and it's almost always about showing enough gratitude. Why do we require you to be eternally grateful for getting what my children get just from an accident of birth? It's insidious really. But like Collins said, you can start to make a new series of decisions when you confront the brutal facts. I knew our next decision had to be to remove judgment in every place possible and to better understand the context of the students we serve. In other words, we need to fix ourselves, not them.

If you have decided what you used to do (no matter how well intended) was the wrong approach, you confront the fact there are no sacred cows. That's excruciating for me. I'm a person who likes context and history, and I wanted the story of our division to be positive though the years and about growing to our best selves. I wanted it be a story built on foundations that lead to continuous improvement and greatness. But the facts were saying that wasn't the case. I wanted to look backwards for the lessons to learn, but the landscape had shifted. It was freeing on some level. We no longer had to display loyalty and fidelity to history (which as we know, might not even be factual, even the part I participated in), we needed to focus on what we were trying to do! When people asked what has changed, that's probably the biggest thing. Disconnecting from trying to serve historical precedents allowed us to say we exist to move people to post-secondary training as quickly as possible so we can help change their economic reality. It allowed us to declare our poverty informed movement and our guiding mantra Every Barrier That Can be Removed, Should Be Removed.

So, as my team and I try to find our way in this nascent #RealCollege movement, we are committed to dealing with brutal facts while retaining an absolute belief in what we can do and the people we serve. Our version of that bit of wisdom from Collins is employing optimism and amnesia at the same time. We believe in people and when they fail, we forget and believe in them again. We know for a fact our students have complicated lives and as one of our teachers said, emergencies most of us don't have to deal with. The brutal fact is if we are poverty informed, we must design systems which work for those students too. We must find a way to get them the learning that can change their reality. This will lead us down paths that look very different than our historical ones. So be it. Our goal is not just to get better, it is to be the single most poverty informed division (and I believe my college will follow) in America. Our goal will not get done in half-measures and by compromise. It will get done by a fearless inventory of the brutal facts and a willingness to go where they lead us. Our students deserve that and more.

Just Tell Us What to Do

Our term ended December 17th, but before I left for a brief period of respite, I had a long conversation with a faculty member I respect. I was sharing some really good news about our increase in Credit for Prior Learning (CPL), when she said, "Chad, I know you think we aren't on board, but we are." I was flabbergasted and had to know more. While I have certainly felt some resistance to my push to make us the most poverty informed division in America, for the most part I've felt people were trying sincerely. In fact, I thought we were rallying around a cause in ways we hadn't in years. But now someone I respected told me things might not be what I thought. So, I was grateful we could sit down for the better part of an hour and talk it through. By the end of our conversation, what she meant was clearer. She said I might be overemphasizing inspiration and under-emphasizing how we were to do what we do. I took the feedback as offered. It was a version of something I've heard before, which is roughly "If you tell us what you want, we will do it." To be honest, that isn't usually what people want in my experience, but I think she was sincere. They were asking for concrete steps and although I thought I'd provided some, she was telling me it wasn't always easy to know where to go. So, today is my next attempt to define what we are doing and, I might as well share what I put together.

Several months ago, when I discussed declaring our movement (read more here), I said that it was important to be concise and compelling. Concise has never been my best thing, but I'm working on it, as evidenced by our mantra Every Barrier That Can Be Removed, Should Be Removed. The mantra has been very useful in helping us make decisions, but the feedback was saying to be we needed more clarity on how. My college president is a big fan of visual management, so I've been trying to enhance my skills in that area. What you see above is probably an over simplified version of very complex work, but it is my current attempt to show what "poverty informed" work means in my areas of influence. Our Poverty Informed Triangle (with appropriate apologies to Maslow and Bloom who have been borrowed from liberally) shows things we believe are essential to designing classes and services that achieve our goal of moving students out of poverty. At a fundamental level, there are three principles: meeting basic needs, creating belonging, and accelerating progress towards goals. Let's look at them in action.


In the interest of clarity let's try to describe what a poverty informed classroom inside a poverty informed division looks like. Basic needs are easiest to understand and sometimes hardest to take care of. For us, it means that no one goes to class hungry. There is always easily accessible food available with no restrictions and no judgment. We have it in classrooms, offices, and the lobby.

The Bowl

We encourage staff to partake as well, because food is relational and creates community (which bleeds into creating belonging). Beyond daily hunger issues, we heed the words of Sara Goldrick-Rab when she said, "You don't have to be a social worker, but you better know one." We house a workforce development agency right inside our department and our staff work hard to be knowledgeable about community resources. From my point of view, the biggest danger in this part of poverty informed work is the tendency to "outsource" responsibility for meeting basic needs (i.e. make a referral). While referrals are often appropriate, it can't be just telling someone help is available. Poverty informed work is relationship based and when we are at our best, we actively connect students to the resources, in person if possible. This also helps us follow Dr. Donna Beegle's advice to develop empathy for the experience of living in the crisis of poverty as well as respect for the strength and resourcefulness students develop because of it. These relationships are key to creating a sense of belonging.

For those familiar with Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, you know that belonging sits near the base, just above basic needs related to survival and safety. Creating belonging is essential to poverty informed programming. Our students in the crisis of poverty often have relied on strong relationships to navigate their lives, and if we can invite them in and develop relationships with them, we start to leverage this amazing quality. A focus on their strengths begins to build their self-efficacy and a vision of themselves as college students. Unfortunately, my experience says there are fundamental mismatches between the stereotypical college campus and the #RealCollege students we serve. That means that we not only don't create belonging as well as we should, we do the opposite, often unintentionally. Dr. Beegle teaches that the context of poverty teaches a world view that is different than the context of something based on middle class values, like a college. To us, that means we must meet people where they are and expose them to possibilities. I would go even further and say you must create trust, because so many prior experiences will teach students from poverty they are intruders on campus. Teachers create belonging through a level of self-disclosure that humanizes them, and they create belonging by listening and validating their students' experiences. Teachers create belonging by knowing your name and your story, rather than retreating to an office between classes. People feel belonging if you show interest in them and not just interest in "fixing" them. Policy and procedures also create belonging or exclusion and should be examined regularly to see if they support students or penalize them unnecessarily. One of the on-going issues we struggle with is how to handle student attendance. Stringent attendance requirements don't seem to acknowledge the complications of student lives and therefore aren't poverty informed. But balancing the need to be in class with the reality of a crisis arising over a full term is always a struggle. Our solution is acceleration.

Students in poverty are in crisis, and it is often an audacious act of courage just to cross our threshold. We know that without a poverty informed approach their odds of success decline dramatically. We know lives can be violently disrupted by things that are annoyances when you are middle class. We know the longer we ask people to wait for something, the higher the odds of disruption are. So, we need to move people to meaningful learning as quickly as possible. Hopefully learning includes an economic payoff that increases stability and gives them more breathing room. Our most powerful strategy so far is Credit for Prior

More Visual Management

Learning (CPL). CPL touches every side of our triangle. CPL grants credit for low or no cost, which helps with basic needs. CPL acknowledges the wealth of experience students bring with them from their life. It creates belonging from moment one by making their life count rather than something they are escaping from. CPL is strengths based and moves people in the quickest way possible to being a student and changing economic reality. Other than CPL, we look for every chance to create the smallest piece of meaningful learning we can, so when it is completed, the student has it moving forward. We are in the process of challenging ourselves to develop competency-based options that aren't bound by time, but by standards. I'll write more about that another time.

I'm not sure if this essay would meet the request to "just tell us what to do", but I do hope it gives a pretty good outline of one way to move toward being poverty informed. Our lens is education obviously, but these principles seem to go across industries and agencies. In fact, I'll be speaking at a health summit this spring, and I will also be working with a parenting resource center in March on these concepts as well. If we are committed to helping people move forward, our odds of doing the right thing go up. If we can find ways to meet basic needs, while creating confidence and belonging, while moving people toward economic stability rapidly, we think we are on the right track. Underlying all this work, must be a resolute belief in the people we serve, and a suspension of any judgment based on rules we hold that don't make sense in their context. We need everyone, let's not lose people because we can't relate and communicate.