Impact Report: Year-Ends 2021 and 2022

SparkPoint

SparkPoint and meeting students' basic needs at the San Mateo County Community College District

United Way of the Bay Area is dedicated to creating pathways out of poverty. “Based on the Annie E. Casey Foundation’s Center for Working Families, SparkPoint Centers were developed in 2009 to work with low-income individuals and families long-term, looking at all aspects of their financial health, with the goal of achieving financial prosperity… All [SparkPoint Centers] are a collaborative of multiple nonprofit and government entities that work together in a single location to seamlessly provide integrated services to assist families in increasing their income, building their credit, and accumulating their assets.” – United Way Bay Area Website https://uwba.org/what-we-do/sparkpoint-program/.

When the SparkPoint Center at Cañada College was founded in February 2015, it became only the second college in California to include such a center. The decision to host the center was based partially on research done by the Hope Institute to address the needs of students seeking economic security while working towards their degrees.

Today, there are 21 SparkPoint centers located within the San Francisco Bay Area, and College of San Mateo and Skyline College each have a center as well. More than places for financial coaching and education, over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic, the SparkPoint Centers at SMCCCD have also become critical resources for students who are food- and housing-insecure.

At its core, SparkPoint’s services have always been based on financial coaching and education designed to help disproportionately impacted clients meet their basic needs, increase their income, build their credit, increase their savings, and reduce their debt. The SMCCCD’s centers had long realized that “meeting basic needs” included a distinct set of challenges for vulnerable students. An on-campus hot meal program and a food pantry were first steps in meeting those needs.

The student community was particularly hard hit economically as the COVID-19 pandemic raged in early 2020. The San Mateo County Community College District and the three college SparkPoint centers responded to student and community needs by launching a weekly food distribution in the College of San Mateo’s largest parking lot. Staffed by community, and faculty and staff volunteers, the distribution, in conjunction with Second Harvest of Silicon Valley, grew to serve 1,000 families and was expanded to Skyline College.

During this time, in a commitment to helping ensure students could continue to pursue their education even during the most challenging circumstances, the District also created a basic needs task force. This cross-functional committee was charged with assessing and addressing student needs in the areas of food, housing, and mental health. On all three campuses, the SparkPoint centers stepped in to become the main resources for meeting these fundamental necessities.

“Students come to SparkPoint for various reasons. We work with individuals so they can meet their basic needs – food or housing – and eventually reach a place where they are ‘SparkPoint-ready’ and can work on financial literacy,” says Adolfo Leiva, director of Cañada College’s SparkPoint center. “This initial basic needs support is time-consuming and doesn’t have a timeline. Ironically, those who are most in need are often those who have the least amount of time to address their issues because of social challenges they face. Each individual needs many more layers of support than just financial counseling, so I’m glad that the District created the task force to address those needs.”

Now that the California legislature has passed bill AB 132 requiring all community colleges to create basic needs centers with a basic needs coordinator, the campus SparkPoint centers have undertaken that role. “Hiring a coordinator and establishing an office will help provide the resources necessary to get students to a ‘SparkPoint-ready’ place where they are stable enough to address financial literacy.”

The SparkPoint venture on the three campuses was originally funded by a grant through the Working Students Success Network and a partnership with United Way Bay Area. Today, it is mostly funded by the San Mateo County Community College District and private donations through the San Mateo County Community Colleges Foundation.

“SparkPoint is changing lives, giving people an opportunity to reach their potential. Many of our students are good people who want to have an impact on their community and want a chance to succeed but don’t have access to resources to do so. Donations in the form of scholarships for these students and support for the SparkPoint centers can help our students climb the ladder of opportunity to be better individuals and to feel good about themselves.”