Our Names are Destiny, Lorinda, and Jose: Navigating Homelessness During COVID-19

In April, SchoolHouse Connection hosted a webinar featuring three young leaders from our Youth Leadership and Scholarship Program, who are navigating higher education during the coronavirus pandemic. During the webinar, the students shared their experiences, challenges, and advice for other students, higher education professionals, and service providers. This post has been repurposed from our blog post. You can check out the full webinar here.

You have all experienced homelessness in K-12, and were resilient in graduating from high school and deciding to pursue higher education. Why is higher education important to you?

Jose: Well higher education is extremely important. It opens up a lot of opportunities. It means you qualify for the jobs that you want. The jobs that are going to be paying decent salaries. You get to learn about a lot of topics, the schools like the one I attended in high school do not even come close to matching.

Destiny: Higher education is really important to me because I was homeless my entire High School career. I was homeless with my family and my family is still currently homeless. The only reason I was able to stop being homeless was by going to college and pursuing my degree. I’m really passionate about it because I want to be able to maintain stability and eventually get stability for my family.

Lorinda: I think probably higher education is important to me just because education as a whole is something that my mom really valued when I was growing up. I grew up with just my mom and my brother, and we experienced homelessness at varying times throughout my life from when I was younger to when I was in high school. Education was always a safe space and something that I knew that I was good at, so higher education is really just an opportunity to kind of continue that. It wasn’t until probably four years after my mom passed away, a few months ago, that I found out that my mom never graduated high school. It’s something that she never told us, but explains why she emphasized the value of education so much. The fact that she went her whole life without the opportunity to get a high school degree, let alone a University degree, and that I am now able to is something I’m really grateful for.

Please share what your college experience has been like since mid-March when college closures started happening. What was being communicated to you? Did you have a point of contact on your campus who was explaining what was happening? Did you know where you were going to live, or where to access food?

Jose: In mid-March my school initially told us not to worry even though other schools were closing. They said “you guys are not going to be kicked out of your dorms, but whoever is able to leave their dorm should be doing that.” But literally a week later, they did a whole 360 and they said you have 48 hours to leave your dorm and pack up everything and this was during spring break. So luckily I was on campus still, but there were a lot of people who weren’t in the city. There were some people that weren’t even in the country and they were making everyone pack things up within such a short amount of time. I go to a pretty large school, so everything was very chaotic. It was unclear who I had to reach out to for help. It was also unclear what help they were providing. I live in the city and my sister luckily lives near my college. So I asked her to come help me and I asked if there was any way I could crash with her, since I’m being kicked out of my school. So right now I’m just staying on the couch. Luckily, my sister was able to help me out a little bit, but I can’t imagine what I would be doing if I didn’t have that option. My school basically told people to apply for housing. They were letting certain people stay on campus, but it was only if you had any immediate danger returning home, or if you are an international student who wasn’t able to return to your home country. But there was nothing being said about students who you know might not have a home to return to. But luckily I did have my sister to help me out.

To hear more about Destiny, Lorinda, and Jose’s experiences and navigating higher education during the coronavirus pandemic, read our blog post here, or check out the full webinar here.