Students Create the ‘Guide to Surviving and Thriving at CUNY’

The spring of 2020 in New York City was surreal and nightmarish. Students and faculty raced to adapt to the new virtual reality while thousands of New Yorkers fell fatally ill and the city became the epicenter of one of the worst Covid-19 outbreaks in the world. Zoe Schacht-Levine, a second year CUNY SPH student, was struggling and she was certainly not the only one. Isolation was hard. The world was a suddenly scary place. Her classes gave her less joy as she became more withdrawn and reluctant to participate over Zoom. Then, as the city and state shut down, the income from her dog walking and coop cashier gigs dried up.

As spring turned to summer, things seemed like they were turning a corner. She started working as a contact tracer for New York City Health and Hospitals. And she had a summer internship lined up with Healthy CUNY, a university-wide initiative to reduce health problems that interfere with academic success. Schacht-Levine felt lucky to have a job with benefits, much less the opportunity to work in her field of study while aiding in the greater public health effort to combat the pandemic.

Then, she got Covid-19.

“There was no way I could have prepared and nothing I could have brought that would have prevented the emotional turmoil I would experience while isolating,” Schacht-Levine would later write in A Guide to Surviving and Thriving at CUNY, a comprehensive manual produced by Healthy CUNY to help students continue their academic pursuits while balancing both Covid-related and unrelated stressors and challenges. It was experiences like quarantining alone in a friend’s empty apartment for two weeks that would inform Schacht-Levine’s work as she participated in the crafting of the Guide last summer for when students would return for an entirely virtual fall semester.

“I was actually quarantining during the first couple meetings,” Schacht-Levine says. As she spent two weeks recovering, Schacht-Levine doubled her telehealth sessions with her CUNY mental health counselor, a process she would go on to praise in the Guide and encourage other students to pursue. “Every day was a little bit better.”

Schacht-Levine was one of seven students in the Healthy CUNY Covid-19 Work Group who, using a survey of 2,300 CUNY students conducted in April 2020, as well as their own research, crafted a guide for students, by students to help their peers survive (and thrive) in the fall semester. Like Schacht-Levine, her fellow students in the working group were drawing from their own lived experience as they worked to find resources and services that could address the struggles of their peers across the CUNY system.

“We realized that students communicating to other students would be much more powerful than people our age, looking like us would be,” says Nicholas Freudenberg, Distinguished Professor of Public Health and Director of Healthy CUNY. “I’ve been teaching at CUNY for more than 30 years and working with the Healthy CUNY Covid-19 team was one of the most exciting and interactive teaching and learning experiences I’ve had in all my years at CUNY.”

The result: a 99-page, one-stop guide with details and resources to handle any challenge students might face during, or after, the pandemic. Officially published in October and reworked with some updated information for the 2021 spring semester, A Guide to Surviving and Thriving at CUNY is split into seven sections tackling educational challenges, mental and physical health, food insecurity, housing, loss of income and employment, racism and discrimination, and individual and collective advocacy. The guide includes student testimonials from the survey and advice from the student writers, having lived through many of these issues themselves.

“A lot of us were going through things at the same time, in real time,” says Erinn Bacchus, a PhD student at CUNY SPH and a student member of the Healthy CUNY Covid-19 Work Group. “People were having issues with finding health care; people were having issues with mental health. People were having issues keeping up with their school year.”

The April survey was conducted by CUNY’s Office of Institutional Research with questions crafted by experts and professors to gauge the impact of Covid-19 on the existing problems Healthy CUNY had already been studying. In order to recruit a representative sample, the survey was sent to over 10,000 students across the system and received 2,282 responses, over 1,000 of which included detailed, written responses to open-ended questions.

“Once CUNY was closed in mid-March, and students were no longer coming to campus, we recognized that many of the problems that we had been studying before the pandemic were likely to become worse,” says Freudenberg. “We found that rates of anxiety, depression, and food insecurity had doubled since early 2018, when we had done a similar survey. And that’s what led us to high levels of alarm that we needed to do something quickly to help students address these problems. And not only did they have much higher levels of anxiety, depression, and food insecurity, but the systems that CUNY had in place to address those problems before the pandemic were mostly not relevant when people couldn’t come to campus.”

Over 80 percent of students who responded to the survey reported a loss of income, according to an article based on the survey data in the Journal of Urban Health published by Freudenberg, Healthy CUNY Deputy Director Patricia Lamberson, and CUNY SPH professors Heidi Jones, Meredith Manze, and Victoria Ngo. More than half of students reported experiencing anxiety and depression and 49 percent reported an increased need for mental health services. Half of respondents also indicated they were worried about losing housing.

The student interns working with Healthy CUNY were tasked with translating this survey data into an actionable public health tool to help their fellow students get through a pandemic without an end in sight.

“It was disheartening, it was saddening, but it was also unsurprising,” says Bacchus of the survey data. “We found that a lot of our students were suffering. And I think that was expected, but we didn’t really know to what degree they were struggling and what exactly they were struggling with. The survey really helped guide our focus.”

Over the summer months, the Work Group would meet weekly as a whole and separately in smaller, topic-specific groups. They began to pull from the mountains of research, resources, and personal testimonials to construct A Guide to Surviving and Thriving at CUNY that would best address the problems they knew their peers were struggling with every day.

“At the end, after the guide came out, I asked ‘have you taken your own advice?’ And every single one of them was like ‘yeah, this part was really helpful’ or ‘I started working with a study group when I realized I was really isolated,’ ” says Professor Jones. “They were students also, so they were clearly experiencing the same issues as the students they were serving. It was really inspiring to work with them.”

Of course, the guide can only link students to existing information, services, and support. It can’t fill the gaps where needed services are lacking. Long before the pandemic, CUNY students struggled with mental health, food insecurity, or finding affordable health care, living with the same challenges and disparities many New Yorkers do. But by providing a one-stop Guide, Healthy CUNY has made it easier for students to find the help they need. By encouraging students to become advocates for themselves and their peers, the Guide supports the activism that has long made CUNY a national model for meeting the needs of its diverse students.

Some of the students from the Healthy CUNY Covid-19 Work Group have graduated and are working in healthcare or health policy in New York City. Others are finishing their degrees and continue to work at Healthy CUNY on a new project analyzing data from a survey of CUNY students focused on health insurance. Though it’s a small operation, Freudenberg hopes that Healthy CUNY’s initiatives will be part of a growing public health infrastructure that can accurately and efficiently get urgent health information, referrals, and services to CUNY students, faculty, and staff.

“In my several decades of doing public health research, advocacy, and program development, I have come to believe that having a college degree is a very powerful protector of health, and a very powerful antidote against the health inequities associated with lower incomes and being Black, Hispanic, immigrant, and other groups,” says Freudenberg. “So CUNY plays a critically important role in the health and wellbeing of our students. We knew from our own studies and from other public health research that mental health, food security, and health care access problems make it harder for students to focus on school, stay in school, and graduate. Healthy CUNY seeks to clear these obstacles so more students can earn the degree that will provide a path to lifetime success, better health, and greater contributions to society.”

Helping students navigate existing food security resources at CUNY

In addition to being the director of Healthy CUNY, Freudenberg is also the director of the CUNY Urban Food Policy Institute and, in January, the Institute secured a two-year, $500,000 grant to launch a joint initiative of both entities: the Campaign for a Food Secure CUNY. Awarded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the grant will fund Freudenberg’s campaign to harness and reinforce existing programs to combat food insecurity among CUNY students. The landmark contribution will bolster CUNY campus pantries and sponsor a drive to enroll CUNY students in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). With recent federal and state expansions of SNAP, many more college students are now eligible, putting additional dollars for food in the pockets of recipients.

“The experience with the Mellon Foundation was unusual and wonderful. They called me up and said they were interested in supporting efforts to reduce food insecurity. Could you use some extra help? And I said yes,” says Freudenberg. “Within three weeks, they sent us a check. It doesn’t often happen that way and it was such a pleasure.”

An essential piece of the Campaign for a Food Secure CUNY will be simply making students aware of existing food security resources CUNY already offers. Surveys conducted before and after the pandemic found many students simply don’t know their campus already has these resources. A 2018 Healthy CUNY report on food security found that only 23 percent of CUNY Undergraduates had knowledge of on-campus food assistance services. The same survey found 15 percent assumed they were ineligible for assistance. While there are many steps that need to be taken, one simple goal Freudenberg has in the next year is for a link to food resources to be added to every course syllabus, next to the mandated inclusions of university policies and plagiarism warnings.

“We think it’s an achievable goal for CUNY to eliminate food insecurity over the next several years,” Freudenberg says. “And we’re hoping to use the Mellon grant to build the infrastructure and the will and commitment to achieve that goal by coordinating and integrating and aligning the many existing efforts around food insecurity now in place at CUNY.”

Even with generous and fortuitous grant funding, Healthy CUNY by itself will not be able to end food insecurity at CUNY. Part of the Campaign for a Food Secure CUNY will be about educating policymakers, from the City Council and the Mayor to the state legislature and the Governor, on the health, educational and economic benefits of ending food insecurity on college campuses.

“If more of our students can finish school, they will be more productive citizens, they will be more engaged in contributing to New York, in supporting the well-being of their families, and also in working and paying taxes,” says Freudenberg. “Certainly in the richest city in the world, we can afford to end the need for our students to choose between going hungry and paying for tuition, books, and transit.”