Helping Students Thrive: Meeting Basic Needs

Practical Skills & Guidance to Support (and Retain!) College Students Struggling with Meeting Their Basic Needs

Learn more at https://www.dprepsafety.com/certification

College students have faced significant challenges in the last several years, including COVID-19, reductions in supportive grants for student services, stress-inducing executive orders from the White House, and increasing costs for housing and food. Many students struggle to balance their basic needs for food, housing, family, health, and work obligations while on the path to academic success. Even with training in counseling, social work, and other supportive approaches to helping, college staff would benefit from having access to detailed and easy-to-follow resource guides to assist students in moving forward in their academic journey.

Group rates are available

Email bethany@dprep.com with questions

Course Description:

This virtual certification course is offered to college staff, counseling, BIT/CARE members, and faculty interested in assisting students in achieving success in their college goals. Chris and Allison will review core intervention, support, and advocacy skills drawn from the fields of social work, counseling, life coaching, academic success, disability accommodation, tutoring, and career services. They will address challenges and offer practical strategies to address housing and food insecurity, academic readiness, mental health, safety planning, study skills development, time management, mental wellness, social support, navigating community services, critical thinking and problem-solving, fiscal management, emotional regulation, and improving self-advocacy. There will be opportunities for case review and discussion, demonstrating how to apply these skills effectively. While Chris and Allison will provide the lead instruction and design for the course, a series of supplemental videos from DPrep Safety’s subject matter experts will offer insight into applying these techniques successfully with the student population.

The course will review of students' core areas of need. We will discuss the importance of assessing local, state, and federal resources and how basic needs staff, case managers, counselors, social workers, and other support staff can better educate students to access resources. We will offer a collection of twenty resource sheets describing the various approaches to helping with worksheets for students to use to put these skills into practice. We will also include several interactive breakout sessions to discuss case study examples showing how these topics are applied.

Supplemental Resources Provided:

• A summary packet for the course
• Access to a recording of the course instruction
• Twenty resource sheets that provide an overview of the intervention approach, what population and problem it would be useful to address, and a case example of the intervention approach in practice
• Thirty worksheets for students to put these concepts into practice
• An interactive, online decision-making rubric that staff can use to choose the appropriate intervention to address the student’s challenge

Summary of Skills Sheets:

1. Addressing Anxiety: The ABCs of REBT. Assisting students in recognizing their irrational thoughts is the first step in helping them find alternative ways to process the world around them.​
2. Addressing Food and Housing Insecurity. Access to food and housing is a crucial barrier for college students to overcome, allowing them to focus on their academic progress.
3. An Optimistic Mindset: Positive Psychology. The study of what goes right in life, from birth to death, and at all stops in between. It examines the strengths and virtues that enable individuals and communities to thrive.
4. Apologizing Well. Understanding how to apologize well builds trust, demonstrates responsibility, and helps students grow personally and socially throughout their college experience.
5. Body Doubling. Body doubling is a focus strategy where you work on a task while another person is physically or virtually present, not to help or supervise, but simply to provide structure and accountability.
6. Boundaries in Social Relationships. Whether from students with developmental disorders or other social challenges, knowing how to teach the importance of boundaries and positive social interactions is an area of need.
7. Building Habits & Making Change: Transtheoretical Change Theory. This approach outlines how people progress through various stages before becoming ready to make lasting changes in their lives.
8. Bystander Empowerment. Bystander empowerment equips college students with the awareness, skills, confidence, and support necessary to safely and effectively intervene when they witness harmful, risky, or potentially dangerous situations.
9. Controlling Your Stress. Regaining control of your stress is a crucial skill essential for success in college, including recognizing the distinction between stress and burnout.​
10. Developing a Better Plan: Reality Therapy. Creating plans and goals for a student in a manner that ensures success based on wants, direction, doing, evaluation, and planning (WDEP). Plans should be simple, attainable, measurable, immediate, controlled by the planner, consistently practiced, and committed to.
11. Domestic & Intimate Partner Violence. Working with domestic violence and college students requires a trauma-informed, student-centered approach that prioritizes safety, autonomy, and access to support.
12. Focusing Attention & Executive Functioning. Executive-function scaffolding skills enable turning a foggy, overwhelming situation into a tiny, doable plan. That means prioritizing ruthlessly, breaking tasks into “first steps,” setting up reminders and structure, and reducing friction with warm handoffs and scheduling help so support is actually usable.
13. Improving Study Skills: Work Smarter, Not Harder. A successful college career begins with understanding what each of your professors and instructors requires to earn a good grade in their class.
14. Managing the Medication Discussion. Understanding the challenges to medication cost, access to providers, compliance, and consistency when taking medication.
15. Money Management. This material will benefit the many students who have not received financial literacy training and often make poor financial decisions when receiving payments from grants, loans, and paychecks.
16. Navigating Conduct and Title IX. Students are often overwhelmed when they enter the student conduct and/or Title IX process. Staff should understand how to support and advocate for the students they are working with on campus.
17. Navigating Hard Conversations. Guidance for staff and faculty on when and how to address complex topics, including the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, reproductive rights, gun ownership, political divides, race relations, immigration, and LGBTQIA+ rights.
18. Overcoming Being Overwhelmed. One of the things we can teach our students is how to gain control over their feelings of panic and dread, and learn to center themselves to focus on the tasks at hand.
19. Pronoun Usage. Understand why pronouns are important as they relate to gender identity, expression, and the separate issues of sexual orientation.
20. Rational & Irrational Fears. Rational fears can motivate planning and help-seeking when they remain proportional to the situation. Irrational fears, however, often exaggerate consequences and push students toward avoidance, procrastination, or isolation.
21. Reading the Room & Thriving: Emotional Intelligence. Emotional intelligence (EQ) refers to the ability to recognize our emotions and those of others. It affects group dynamics, individual and group performance, creativity, communication, and motivation.
22. Roommate Conflicts. Roommate conflicts on college campuses often stem from everyday differences rather than major incidents. When concerns go unaddressed, small irritations can escalate into tension, withdrawal, or passive-aggressive behavior, making early communication and support key to preventing more serious problems.
23. Safety Planning: Mental Illness and Suicide Risk. The collaborative process between the staff and students aims to increase warning sign awareness and build internal coping strategies to overcome challenges they may face related to self-harm, suicide, and general functioning.
24. Self-Advocacy. An important skill for any college student is knowing when to ask for help and advocate for themselves in various settings, including the classroom, with friends and family, at work, and with their healthcare needs.
25. Stalking. Stalking can have serious, wide-ranging impacts on college students, affecting nearly every aspect of their daily functioning. This stress can disrupt sleep, concentration, and memory, leading to missed classes, declining academic performance, and withdrawal from campus activities.
26. Stress and Burnout Assessment. This assessment is helpful for students to gain insight into their functioning at college. This checklist can be given to the student to complete and bring back to you for scoring and further direction.
27. Support Critical Thinking Skills: Redefining Failure. Narrative therapy helps students see their stories from a different perspective. The story doesn’t change, but how they think about it shifts
28. Supporting Students of All Religions. Given the recent conflict in the Middle East and the increase in tensions between Jewish and Muslim students, it is helpful to better understand the conflict and how to address it.
29. Taking Care of Hygiene and Shared Spaces. Addressing odor and hygiene concerns is a student-support intervention that sits at the intersection of learning, dignity, equity, and well-being. When handled with privacy, compassion, and clear referral pathways, these conversations shift the focus from embarrassment or punishment to support, connection, and student success.
30. Understanding the Black College Student Experience. Recognizing the obstacles faced by the African diaspora helps institutions develop targeted resources and policies that promote equity, mental health, and academic success.