Have you ever thought that there might be students at your school who don’t have anything to eat or a place to sleep after class? Most of us don’t think of homelessness as happening to college students, but it does—According to federal student aid data, more than 58,000 students indicated they were homeless in 2013.
Yara Mowafy realized student homelessness was an issue when she was a freshman at George Mason University in 2011, and spent most of her time there working on research and projects to help alleviate the problem. While she was there, she helped start a meal assistance fund, a food pantry and a support network for students in need. She also won an Undergraduate Award for Research for the research she’s done on student homelessness.
The 23-year-old just graduated from GMU with a master’s degree in International Development, and now hopes to start working with refugees. We chatted with Yara just before her graduation to learn more about homelessness in college, how Yara worked on the issue at her school, and what more needs to be done to solve this problem on campuses around the country.
Her Campus: So could you start by just telling me a little bit about yourself and your research?
Yara Mowafy: The research was something that I did a while ago, maybe 2014. I was an undergrad at George Mason University and I knew that we had a population on campus that was homeless and hungry and I didn’t think that we (at the university) were doing much about it. My first step was to really recognize the problem on campus by assessing the prevalence and the nature of these experiences, to acknowledge that they exist, and to figure out ways that we can intervene and even prevent it from happening. So I started the research in July of 2014 as just that—measuring the prevalence of homelessness and hunger on campus in Fairfax, VA, which at the time was one of the wealthiest counties in the country, and really looking at the narrative that came out of the conversations and interviews that we had with students to see the common themes, what kind of patterns emerged throughout their experiences and how they got there. Just essentially how that started and what we did.
HC: And how did you gain interest in the topic and realize that this was something that needed more research?
Y: I was a freshman in 2011 and, for a communications and public speaking course, I had to talk about something that was bothering me, something that I wanted to change on campus or in the world, and that same day I went to the dining hall where I had several people offer to pay for my food and swipe for me. So I looked into why people were so willing to waste a meal plan or meal swipes, and I found out that meal swipes expired on a certain day of the week, so if you don’t use all of your prepaid meals, you lose access to those swipes. So that was something that set off a little lightbulb. I was like ‘Oh my gosh, we pay for all this food and, when we don’t use it, it goes to waste. So why don’t we donate all these meal plans to people who might need it?’
That was the initial plan. I reached out to homeless shelters and other NGOs in the area that work with vulnerable populations, seeing if any of them would be interested in being on the receiving end of these unused meal plans, and one of them said something on the phone that was like ‘Well finally Mason is doing something about their students. At the homeless shelter, we actually get tons of students that come and seek safe and secure housing or even just warmth.’ And that was the first I’d ever heard of that. I didn’t even grasp the concept of, ‘How could a student be enrolled in college and just not have anywhere to sleep?’ I just didn’t get that, and that’s sort of how everything started. At that point it was 2012 and I didn’t really have the resources or the voice or the network to look into this and to figure out anything so I created this and petitioned the school to pay more attention to this population and figure out what their needs were. Three thousand students signed this petition that all unused meal plans would go to students that are suffering from homelessness or that have some sort of food or housing insecurity.
A year later, we were able to establish a meal assistance fund that’s essentially a bank account where private donors can donate and put money into it and they can use that money to purchase meal vouchers and all students can have access to dining halls. We didn’t use the unused meal plan idea, it just didn’t work with the contract we had with dining services, but we did create a fund that receive many donations from the local community and large NGOs. So that was a great success in 2013 but I still felt like we didn’t do much, like we were just giving out meal vouchers and it wasn’t very sustainable or personal, and that’s when I wanted to do the research to acknowledge that there was a larger population and other problems that we really weren’t getting into with these vouchers. Through the research, those kinds of things emerged. Our first step was the support network model for students, and we started a food pantry on campus in December of last year. We’ve had about 60 students come forward seeking food assistance or employment assistance or housing assistance or even just having a consistent person to talk to about their issues and someone who might understand, from a student perspective, how difficult it is to focus on school and having to prioritize between tuition or shelter or rent or food, so it’s grown tremendously from a little project to a meal voucher program to a full on support network model for students that need that consistency and that stability.
HC: So you’re still involved in the day-to-day operations of that?
Y: Yes I am, it’s actually my current job on campus. So it’s something we started in December and it’s been ongoing since.
HC: Why do you think it was important to do the research? How did the research inform what you ended up doing with the money and the donations?
Y: The research didn’t necessarily inform the operation, but it informed the way that we could solve the problem. One of the things that came up was that every single student we spoke with had thought that they were the only ones on campus that were experiencing it. So there was this idea of stigma. It was students not being able to talk about their experiences, or not wanting to talk about their experiences because they just didn’t understand that there was a larger population or a more widespread prevalence of these issues because they were so untraditional. One of the things that we tried to do was to go into classrooms, and talk to advisors and professors, and give them language to speak around these problems in class so that students know that there are resources and that these are real problems that people are experiencing in this area.
HC: How did you find students to interview, seeing that this is such an invisible problem on campus?
Y: It was actually really difficult. We started with postering and flyering all over campus and students responded pretty well to that. There was a phone number, we had a picture (of me) but students responded well knowing that there was a real person back there to communicate with. It was confidential. There was an expectation that the university would assist after finding out about it and that was our goal—to implement change on campus. The other piece was contacting the departments on campus that run into these students more often, especially cleaning staff who spot some students overnight. We created connections with them and they would reference students over.
HC: How do you think your own background got you interested in these issues these issues?
Y: I’m from Egypt, so I’ve lived in a third-world, developing country. We had everything we needed and more, but growing up, we also saw the other end of the spectrum and we saw how hard it was for people to get by. On the other hand, we were extremely comfortable. So my parents always made it a point to give if we have. On the weekends, our friends would go out to country clubs, and we would go to orphanages or children’s hospitals. I didn’t really process that or grasp it at the time because, for five or six-year-olds, you go and find a friend and you play with them and it doesn’t matter if they’re bald or they don’t have parents. You don’t really process those kinds of things. But I think after we grew up and reflected back, it made us who we are in terms of how compassionate we are towards other people. It’s become an ingrained part of who I am.
HC: What do you think is next for you in terms of continuing this work or moving on to something else?
Y: I’ve been doing this for a solid three to four years now and it’s time to pass over the torch. I want to work with refugees. I’m multilingual in Arabic and French and I think I would be really helpful in that realm in terms of making sure people are getting all the help and support that they need during these miserable situations.
HC: I’m sure you talked to your friends about the research you were doing and the projects you were working on. What were their reactions to finding out that there were all these students on campus who are homeless and struggling with various issues?
Y: Everyone was kind of caught off-guard by it, but I think when you really think about it, it makes sense that people fall through the cracks and that the system, federal or state, it misses people. Almost everyone I’ve talked to about it had never heard about this unless they’re working for a police department or student services. It’s not something that’s covered largely in the media, but it has been recently. It’s in the process of making a bigger impact.
HC: Is there a time that you remember where you realized that the work you were doing was really making an impact?
Y: Every day. I can’t even think of a specific event but I think just getting a thank you from someone and having them say, “I can go home today and feed my family,” or, “I can eat because I haven’t in four or five days.” I think that’s the best part of it because you know, at that point, that you’re affecting someone’s life directly. Sometimes it is short-term, we’ve had students not need to come to us for help anymore, which is amazing. They’ve been able to get on their feet and find a good job. Those are the moments where I’m like, we did something good here. Everyone affects us in a different way. Especially the students who don’t need us anymore but come back and volunteer—That’s the best part. Because we’ve created this community where students receive, but they also give back.
HC: What more needs to be done to combat this issue? What kind of changes do you think universities can make to find these students and help them have better experiences?
Y: The first issue is federal assistance, like Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA), and how the questions are not all-encompassing or inclusive of the non-traditional students I was talking about. A student could be dependent and legally bound to their parents financially, but if they’re kicked out of their home for whatever reason—like getting into a fight, or if they’re gender identity isn’t what the family expected or wanted, or if they major in something that the family doesn’t like, socially, that person would be looked at as independent when they’re really still a dependent. The federal government would identify that person as independent.
The other thing is the standard of living. When students can only work part-time because they’re full-time students, the money they make is not enough to pay rent, especially in an area like this where it’s $600-$800 a month just for a room and a full bathroom if you’re lucky, it’s just not realistic. In terms of universities, a lot of universities have great models when it comes to tackling the issue of homelessness with things like housing scholarships which are need-based. They have things like rolling scholarships for emergencies and unexpected things that happen during the semester like being evicted or whatever, because crises in life don’t happen before scholarship deadlines. They happen on random days when funds have been allocated. So a way to have resources for students at all times is to get rid of those deadlines and constraints because we need to have a more fluid flow of monetary import. Other things like renting out rooms on campus or having dorms open during breaks so students who live on campus and are on scholarship aren’t homeless during the break and have nowhere to go.
HC: How do you think the work you’ve done at GMU is going to help you move into more global or international aid work?
Y: It really all comes down to human interaction. What I’ve learned from this is how to speak to people and figure out what their needs are without being emotionally attached or compromising my mental stability because of what I’m hearing. So that means having a conversation with them and hearing really horrible things happening to them and just being rational and focusing on how to move forward.
This interview has been lightly edited for clarity.