SDSU Basic Needs Kits

The SDSU Basic Needs Center seeks to continue and expand our Basic Needs Kit program in which we provide students with a variety of hygiene, school, menstrual, and other products to support their basic needs. Based on the understanding that students are faced with a multitude of costs and face basic needs insecurities at high rates, the Basic Needs Center officially launched a program in Fall 2023 to assist with providing necessary basic needs products to students. Once per month, students are able to request a personalized kit with no questions asked via a Google Form in which they may choose from items such as soap, toilet paper, toothpaste, laundry detergent, scantrons, notebooks, menstrual products, and more. Pregnant and parenting students may also request to add on diapers and wipes as well. Basic Needs Kits provide shortterm support while we work to connect students to long-term solutions including selfsufficiency resources such as CalFresh, Medi-Cal, and CalWORKs, along with financial education, financial aid and scholarships, employment, and more. From the beginning of Fall 2023 to April 2024, we have had 2,270 check-ins at the Basic Needs Center to pick up Basic Needs Kits, and plan on continuing to expand the program as we move forward. As the Basic Needs Center has just celebrated its one-year anniversary, our future objectives include implementing larger marketing campaigns of our services through targeted campus outreach. We plan on increasing our footprint on campus through a greater number of campus presentations and outreach to faculty and supportive staff to assist in disseminating information about our services throughout campus. Basic Needs Kits will continue to be highlighted as a low-barrier service in which any fully matriculated student can request a kit. This service could be replicated at campuses throughout the system by identifying the basic needs items that each campus would like to provide, setting up a request form and/or integrating into the campus food pantry if they are within the same department, creating appropriate marketing, and identifying a funding source.