Connecting college students with community resources: An update
The UM Renter Center has an exciting update concerning the creation of a community resource database for UM students facing basic needs insecurity. If you have a fantastic memory and are an ardent follower of the Griz Renter Blog you are thinking: I already read a blog post about this! You would be correct as Jordan Lyons, director of the ASUM Renter Center at the University of Montana, pitched this idea in a blog post close to a year ago.
If you’d like to refresh your memory here is a link to the original post: https://medium.com/griz-renter-blog/connecting-college-students-with-community-resources-a4749bf9365b
This post aims to bring this project full circle and provide an update on the work Jesse LaFlesch, Kathryn Reese, and Sean Rice did to create a prototype database that could be used to connect UM students to important resources in the campus and Missoula community. The need for a community resource database aimed at students became apparent from the results of the #RealCollege Survey which uncovered that of those University of Montana students surveyed:
- 42% of respondents were food insecure in the prior 30 days
- 55% of respondents were housing insecure in the previous year
- 28% of respondents were homeless in the previous year
According to Lyons, the “gulf between the need for and the use of services may be that students do not know what resources are available or believe they would not qualify to use them.” With this idea in mind, Lyons pitched the creation of the database to a class of computer science students preparing to work on a comprehensive capstone. LaFlesch, Reese, and Rice, all computer science students, decided to tackle this project.
With the goal of consolidating information for UM students in mind, the team began by sketching a rough draft of the home page and subsequent pages within the database. The resources provided on the homepage LaFlesch, Reese, and Rice organized are wide-ranging. A student can find resources focused on food, money, transit, legal issues, housing, and health etc. LaFlesch, Reese, and Rice also created a survey within the database that guides participants to connected questions concerning what resources they may need.
A key part of this database was using open-source software. “The students used tools from Open Referral,” said Lyons. “And contributed back the software they made, so anyone can find it on GitHub and use it.”
The UM Renter Center is excited to have a prototype of such a database available for student use. LaFlesch, Reese, and Rice’s hard work over the course of the school year makes it possible for the UM Renter Center to meet the needs of students and connect them to the plethora of resources in the Missoula community so they can be a person first and a student second.
