Restrictions to snap eligibility such as being enrolled more than half time, were temporarily lifted. But as more campuses reopen, more feed resources should become available. This is even more important for Many College Students who were nontraditional low income, or first generation students. They must meet other challenges while pursuing a degree like being a single parent, support independence, or working full time while attending class. Many students need to prioritize other Family Member needs over their own including food. So today we will hear from individuals and groups doing advocacy work on diversity campuses across the country. I believe we should be making a commitment to students who are doing everything they can to gain an education and achieve their goals. This issue of College Hunger is not new. In terms of our discussing it it is relatively new. So this has been a problem for a long time. And i want to applaud those colleges that are taking the lead in trying to mitigate some of the challenges that students face when they come onto campus who are struggling to make sure they have enough to eat. But there is a lot more we need to do. As we prepare, this needs to be part of this discussion. I think there is a bigger role on the federal level that we can play to help deal with this issue. I believe no one in this country should be hungry. My eyes have opened up as i have talked to many students, many College President s and many teachers and advocacy organizations on behalf of students who struggle, about the extent of this. By the way, it is not just on campuses of Community Colleges or state colleges. Some of our moat elite institutions have students who struggle with hunger. Now let me turn to our witnesses today. The director of Strategic Initiatives at the university of california berkeley. He is a National Expert on Food Insecurity and the policies that address the issue. Sarah is the president and founder for the hope center for College Community and justice at temple university. Her innovative reserves on College Student basic needs sparked the national hashtag, realcollegemovement. Dr. Joseph is the acting director of the office of counseling and Career Placement Services at Allen University. He started the first food pantry in april of 2019. Which has since provided over 2800 food bags to students on campus. Dr. Alicia powers is the managing director at the Hunger Solutions institute at armen university. Today her leadership draws on her experience coordinating and evaluating policies, systems and environmental approaches to food donate excess dining hall passes to their peers and has expanded since then. I am grateful to all of you for being here. This is an important topic and we will begin with i will yield to you now. Thank you so much and good morning. It is an honor and a pleasure to be here with you all joining in live from the bay area. Shout out to the bay and all the people that have a special heart for the bay. I am so grateful to be here with you all. I want to invite all generations of students and folks dedicated to students past, present and future who have made this possible because it was community and organizing that really mobilized us to be here today. I want to start by sharing my awe at the pace this happened. All of a sudden i got an invitation to this fancy space and i see a letter signed by so many chair folks calling President Biden to make this National Conference a reality, to finally eradicate hunger out of america. So i am in awe of the pace we are moving because i vividly remember when i was in high school and despite me being involved in all of the federally funded state funding, accelerated programs, after school programs, the whole works , i never had a conversation with anyone at any point about basic needs in college. All the conversations and all those programs are always about what college was going to be liked, how to apply to college, but no one ever prepared us to navigate our basic needs. Even when i received a fulbright scholarship to attend uc berkeley i was told we did not have anything to worry about when i got to uc berkeley i was told my scholarship was not going to cover my basic needs yearround and i could also not work. So that was a huge issue for myself and for my families who i had earned the right to contribute to our families through martial arts teaching karate with my father. But i can no longer do that because of Financial Aid policies. When i would go and ask in terms of academic counselors, faculty, staff, administrators, they would just share with me their stories. Some of them would share that 5, 10, 20 years ago they had the same issues with the food and whether housing and medical and health care needs. Never did a professor in the academic setting ever ask us as a what was our capacity and adjust it in an equitable manner according to our capacities, the workload, the midterms, the finals. Never. Even though they knew that some of my peers were legacy, multigenerational wealthy students whose only responsibility was to go to class. To this day i do not know of any college or university that has equity centered academic policy. Things are even more challenging today for our students. Not only are they navigating these basic needs challenges and academic rigor but they also have challenges of environmental catastrophe, compound pandemics and extreme political swings that impact budgets and decisionmaking about their daytoday lives with no navigational training before getting into college. Thankfully over the last 13 years now, time flies and a fascinating way, especially in a pandemic. But now it is a completely different reality. Our new vice chancellor actively shared their own lived experience as a priority. All new admins at berkeley receive a message from our basic needs center staff to make sure they understand that through their nonlinear experience of basic needs we are going to be there to support them. This is not just happening at berkeley, it is happening across all 10 uc campuses. We have a Systemwide Committee that is coordinating research, sustainability, and advocacy across those canvases. Our student rising lists basic needs as a priority. Our office of the president and our uc regions are at the forefront of this conversation working with us, and we created the california higher ed basic Needs Alliance to bring together california Community Colleges, california state universitys, and university of california system to Work Together to build trusting relationships with state department, committees, associations, coalitions, and do this Work Together. Basic needs is not an area of competition and institutional ego and isolation. This is a community that is lifting possibilities. I want to wrap my times a week and transition into conversations by leaving you with all the possibilities. We need to name College Students among our federal populations among side children, singleparent, veterans, and elderly, because College Students have identities that are all of those. We also need to be intentional about designing the federal departments centering College Students. Because you do not just copy and paste College Students and think the existing ecosystem is built for them because it simply is not. There are a lot of possibilities that we can develop by centering the college experience. And lets remind ourselves, a lot of our College Students are translators and a sister is for our peers and communities as they apply for these programs. The last thing is to think about how do we prevent and not just address Crisis Resolution. We invest by doubling the pell for undergraduates and reminding ourselves that graduate students will not benefit from doubling the pell grant. In closing, i am super excited to continue our relationships and to organize with one another. I hope that we can be part of the conversation that will shape this National Conference, but what i am more excited about is the journey beyond the conference and how we are going to bring medicine and transformative possibilities moving forward. College students are not trying to be placed in a higher ranking level of the higher value. We want all solutions to be for all people at all times moving together. Thank you all so much for this information. I am super excited for our quality time together as we work towards ending hunger together as a community. Thank you. Good morning chairman, Ranking Member, and distinguished members of the community. Thank you so much for your commitment to highlighting and taking bold action to end hunger on College Campuses. The opportunity to speak today is a great sign of progress and a true honor. I am the founder and president of the hope center for College Community and just as, and i am also professor of sociology and medicine at the lewis school of medicine at temple university. The hope centers primary expertise is in basic needs of security including Food Security among College Students. Having been deeply engaged in this work for more than 20 years, i can assure you the basic needs and security in Higher Education, particularly Food Insecurity and hunger, is real, it is pervasive, and it is something that we can absolutely solve with the right combination of political will and strategic investment. My teams Real College Survey is the nations largest annual assessment of students basic needs. Over the last six years, it has been completed by more than 500,000 students across the nation. We consistently find that about one in three undergraduates experiences Food Insecurity. Students at community and technical colleges and those attending historically black colleges and universities and tribal colleges and universities are at the highest risk. Rates of Food Insecurity are also higher among africanamericans, latinx students, indigenous, and native students. Students with children experience higher rates of Food Insecurity during college than students without kids. Rates of Food Insecurity are also much higher among students over 25, lgbtq students, veteran students, former foster youth, and students who are pursuing college after incarceration. Long before the pandemic struck, Higher Education and safety net policies failed to address the new economics of college, and evolve with the students they are supposed to serve. Public benefits programs like snap are a critical tool, but most food insecure students do not get snap benefits. Largely due to restrictions on who can access them, and difficulty applying. Even students who are deemed eligible for snap or other supports are often blocked by complex bureaucracies and administrative burden. Many colleges and universities are doing what they can, and going beyond food pantries. This is important because while campus food pantries can help draw attention to the problem, they are not effective in reducing Food Insecurity. Centralizing access to Public Benefits, emergency aid Case Management services, and a food pantry in one location is a promising approach. Evaluations of models like single stock in a Resource Center show that with their basic needs addressed, students have a substantially greater likelihood of success in college. Recognizing that the National SchoolLunch Program abruptly ends with a when a student finishes high school, some colleges and universities provide free meals. Compton college in los angeles partnered with every table to offer free, healthy take away meals. Following a hunger strike, the university of kentucky partnered with to open the one Community Cafe which served to go meals for 1. In its first year, it fed about 24,000 students. Students have had to engage in hunger strikes in order to get help elsewhere, too, including at spelman and morehouse. A community in New Hampshire recently began providing free daily breakfast and lunch, and one dinner per week, to all enrolled students. And this month, another Community College in missouri expanded its Free Breakfast Program to all of its campuses. Bottom line, the science suggests that these efforts work. The hope center evaluated a Meal Voucher Program and found it boosted payments, likely improved students wellbeing, and reduce the severity of Food Insecurity. Emergency cash assistance is another promising approach. It offers students the dignity of choice, while helping them address their basic needs. Our latest survey that having more or better food to eat was one of the top five most cited cases of emergency thought. In partnership with the American Federation of teachers, the nonprofit operates a fast button, engaging faculty to distribute emergency aid in a compassionate and rapid manner. Compton college, dallas coverage college, western governors university, and many others offer fast and easy access to emergency funds 24 7, using an app called equity. Among the more than 97,000 students at 18 institutions who have applied using that app this year, an estimated 44 were food insecure. An initial evaluation suggests students who received just 250 in emergency aid were twice as likely to graduate. These initial actions are a good start but they are not nearly enough for a problem affecting at least 5 million College Students. So here are our recommendations. First, leverage title four to require institutions to document and address Food Insecurity and allocate sufficient funds to help. Most funds to Higher Education right now are allocated by aggregating parttime students into fulltime equivalents, which effectively minimizes support for the nearly 6 million parttime students, many of whom have children and are at greater risk of Food Insecurity. It is far more equitable and effective for federal and state policymakers to distribute funds based on the number of students being educated. Second, pass the student Food Insecurity act to permanently explant expand step and provide grants to institutions to identify and reduce Food Insecurity. In addition, pass the eats to eats act. Congress should also expand the National SchoolLunch Program to Higher Education. School students make the transition to college doing everything they have been told to do, only to find that critical support is no longer there. Its illogical, and it undermines our investment in that. Third, make the pandemic emergency aid a permanent feature of todays Higher Education landscape. Congress allocated billions of pandemic relief to students who will continue to need it long after this crisis. Those grants are available to students who cannot complete the fafsa. It will fill in where standard aid fall short and they need to be part of our Financial Aid system forever. Fourth, provide incentives for colleges and communities to address food deserts and expanding availability of nutrition, lowcost food. Institution should be held accountable for prioritizing affordability, student health, and academic success for setting the prices with cap a starting campus dining. Millions of students are dropping out of college not for lack of talent but for lack of money for food. This is a legacy of a lack of public investment, dramatic inequality and above all a basic misunderstanding of who students are and what they need to succeed. As a nation we are eating our seed corn. I ask this committee to listen to our students like an undergraduate at lake forest college, originally from chicago, a mom, the first in her family to attend college and she first graduated from the city to college of chicago. She is now a member of an advisory council. Ask as for what she wanted you to know today she said this. I attend college to increase economic mobility with a degree. One year i looked worked fulltime and picked up overtime when i could, attended classes in the evening fulltime and managed to attend many of my as many of my Daughters School events as possible. I averaged two hours of sleep a night and ate about one meal every two to three days. I know where and how to discreetly push on my stomach to quiet it when i start one of my morning lectures. I tell my classmates that i eat lunch at