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.