The Associated Students of Colorado State University organized the first-ever Colorado Basic Needs Summit April 9, beginning what they hope to be an annual tradition of collaborative community outreach.

Hosted by CSU Spur in Denver, the event was attended by six nonprofit organizations and 13 colleges across Colorado, bringing together a multitude of perspectives, disciplines and areas of expertise. Jorja Whyte, the ASCSU director of basic needs, said the conference gave students an opportunity to brainstorm and work with larger advocacy organizations.

“(Students) understand what initiatives and what solutions and what programming is going to be effective and what’s going to work,” Whyte said. “That’s kind of what we wanted to create with the summit, is a space and time for professionals, and with a high focus on students to be able to talk about the work that they’re doing, share best practices, be able to build relationships and connections with one another and then be able to align our advocacy efforts so that we can work together on these things.”

The conference featured talks on a variety of subjects, ranging from housing security, food assistance and access to reproductive care and legislative action in Colorado. Amber Obermaier, the leader of the Food Security Advisory Council at CSU, said the summit aimed to highlight and address the gaps in meeting student needs.

“Having access to (food) is a basic human right, and having access to a safe and affordable place to live should be a basic human right,” Obermaier said. “But as we’ve seen, … there’s such a gap in securing those basic human rights for so much of the student population. I just really think there needs to be a paradigm shift of putting those issues at the forefront and naming them as human rights and as the foundation of what we need as students to thrive.”

CSU’s Senior Program Coordinator for Basic Needs Kathryn Conrad gave the keynote speech, encouraging attendees to use the summit as a forum to build community, share perspectives and swap ideas.

“We’ve found that food insecurity tends to be tied with other basic needs and security,” Conrad said. “Usually, we find that if someone is consistently skipping meals or eating off the dollar menu or forgoing nutritious foods for what is cheapest at the grocery store, then it’s likely they’re also having a really hard time making rent, purchasing hygiene products, paying utility bills, paying for parking passes, car payments, bike repairs and other kinds of things like that. So it’s all intertwined, and that’s why we’re here today.”

Food insecurity was one of the main focus points at the conference, with the nonprofit organizations Nourish Colorado, Swipe Out Hunger, Hunger Free Colorado and Colorado Blueprint to End Hunger all attending the summit.

Jordan Lamport and Alejandra Ospina Estefan from Hunger Free Colorado gave a talk on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program — more commonly referred to as SNAP — policy and advocacy, alongside CSU students Yasmine Lawson and Gabi Goldberg, both of whom work with CSU’s Student Case Management.

“There’s tons of people across the entire state, as we can see today, that are doing this work and that care about resolving that crisis, and so I want people to feel empowered to be able to connect and leverage each other for that work.” -Jorja Whyte, ASCSU director of basic needs

The talk detailed SNAP eligibility and common barriers to obtaining government assistance, including immigration status, income requirements, monthly work hour minimums and more. Hunger Free Colorado works with a variety of organizations and universities to reduce barriers to food access and encourage nutritious eating.

“A quote that we opened our presentation with was, ‘Access without support is not opportunity,’ which is a quote by Vincent Tinto,” Lawson said. “That’s at the core of what we do.”

Students representing a variety of university food pantries and advocacy groups attended the conference to share insight on successful and unsuccessful approaches to addressing student food insecurity, as well as the importance of working toward sustainability. Angelica Marley and Lucinda Harger represented Metropolitan State University’s Rowdy’s Corner, which has partnered with several organizations to create robust food banks for students.

Lauren Davis, chair of the Housing Caucus at CSU, gave a talk on the intersection between food insecurity and housing insecurity. She presented an interactive map to the audience that illustrated how basic needs issues are related to one another, exemplifying the concept of systems thinking.

Systems thinking, the underlying ideology of the summit, seeks to understand the interconnectedness of several issues in order to determine a common cause.

“When you look at the systems map, you can kind of start to notice some of the root causes and connections,” Davis said. “(This is) where you can step in as students, as professional people, as anyone who has influence in the basic needs realm, and how you can kind of have that influence and change those root causes.”

Housing insecurity is another prevalent issue for students that the summit addressed. Representatives from the nonprofit Housing Colorado and University of Colorado Boulder’s Basic Needs Center gave talks on CU’s campus housing safety net, a unique service that provides students with emergency housing.

Lauren Fiddes and Ava Richardson gave a talk on behalf of the CU Basic Needs Center, presenting the university’s multifaceted approach to addressing housing insecurity and student homelessness.

“We created a more comprehensive definition for our center so that we could expand and grow but also see basic needs as a center for health and well-being,” Fiddes said. “This is more centered on, ‘How do we use basic needs for students to be successful? How do we meet those needs in a comprehensive way?’”

This systems-based lens also extended to conversations about reproductive care. Olivia Friske, chair of the Women’s Caucus for ASCSU, delivered a talk on the importance of recognizing reproductive care as a basic need, detailing the work that CSU has done to accommodate students.

“There’s always going to be gender diversity; there’s always going to be people who menstruate; there’s always going to be people giving birth and people having sex, so it’s not going to go away,” Friske said. “Because such a large population experiences things like menstruation or pregnancy, there are certain things that are required and needed, and that makes it a basic need.”

In order to meet food, housing and reproductive needs on a statewide level, the summit highlighted the importance of policy advocacy. Wendy Peters Moschetti, the executive director of Nourish Colorado, and Greta Allen, Blueprint’s policy director, both gave a comprehensive overview of how the Colorado legislature works and how to advocate for policy change.

“Building relationships with legislators and policymakers and traditional power holders is absolutely everyone’s right and something that folks should do,” Allen said. “You have the right to talk to them (and) share issues that matter to you. You don’t need someone like me to do that. You don’t need your school to do that. You can do that.”

Young Invincibles, a nonprofit that encourages young adults to engage in political advocacy, also tabled at the summit.

ASCSU’s Deputy Director of Basic Needs Lauren Johnson said collaboration and advocacy is particularly important right now, given the possibility that access to basic needs could be limited under President Donald Trump’s administration.

“Given our current federal state and all of the drastic things they’re going to be doing, especially related to reproductive rights as well as housing, we’re going to have a lot of issues with that,” Johnson said. “Their budget is going to cut a lot of rent vouchers. They’re going to get rid of a lot of affordable housing, and so advocating in Colorado and in Fort Collins is so vital right now.”

The event concluded with a collaborative planning workshop where attendees crafted a statewide advocacy plan.

“It’s also forgotten how much we need to listen to each other, even the people who are completely against what we’re for because there’s a reason why,” Lawson said. “Maybe once we listen to each other, we can work together to find a common goal, find a way to make sure that just because I win doesn’t mean you lose, and vice versa.”

That sense of collective purpose and shared responsibility carried through the final discussions as participants looked ahead to tangible steps and ongoing collaboration.

“There’s tons of people across the entire state, as we can see today, that are doing this work and that care about resolving that crisis, and so I want people to feel empowered to be able to connect and leverage each other for that work,” Whyte said. “I want us to come away with actionable steps that we can take together, unified across the state to be able to continue to increase basic needs security among all of our institutions.”

Reach Chloe Waskey at news@collegian.com or on social media @CSUCollegian.