Editor’s Note

The stories in this series, “Odysseys of housing insecure students—Getting a degree when you have no home,” are the result of a collaboration between Ethnic Media Services (EMS); the newspaper La Opinión; and El Nuevo Sol, the bilingual multimedia publication of the Spanish-language journalism program at California State University, Northridge (CSUN). The project, supported through a fellowship from the James Irvine Foundation, established a virtual newsroom space where EMS’s founder, Sandy Close, met regularly over a period of nine weeks with five CSUN students and me, their journalism professor and mentor.

The series intends to put a face to the startling statistics about homelessness and housing insecurity among California college students. Homelessness affects one in five community college students, one in ten students in the California State University system, and one in twenty students in the University of California system. Insecure housing (for example, not having enough money to pay rent or couch-surfing with friends) affects 60 percent of community college students and 32.8 percent of students in the California State University system.

This collaboration between ethnic media and bilingual-bicultural college journalism students is significant for several reasons. First, it allowed students with limited financial resources to be paid to work with professional journalists in a coaching process and a nurturing environment, where they were given support to develop a project from beginning to end—not an easy task in the middle of the pandemic. EMS established a rigorous timeline and a spirit of collaboration that allowed students to establish a solid and cohesive reporting group where all cooperated to produce stories instead of competing. Third, it gave students access to other professional journalists and sources of information that otherwise would be hard for journalism students to access. And fourth, it gave students the opportunity to see their work published by the top Spanish-language newspaper in their city, allowing them to share their stories with their families.

–Dr. José Luis Benavides, journalism professor and creator of the Spanish-language journalism program at CSUN