Yvonne Montoya, 49, a student, and mother of three, knows what it’s like to be homeless and hungry in college. After the recession hit and she lost her event-planning business and her home, Montoya, who had never finished her degree, spent several nights sleeping on the nearby campus of the University of California at Los Angeles.
One night, while trying to fall asleep in a garden near the public-policy building, she decided she had to give college another try. “I thought, This is ridiculous. I have too many skills to stay in this situation.”
She eventually got a hotel voucher for herself (two of her children were adults, and her ex took care of the third, a teenager) and enrolled in Cerritos College. There she subsisted on soda, chips, and other “munchables” that she could find at CVS — the only place near campus that would take her food stamps.
“They had a culinary program, and students would sell their food on campus. It would kill me knowing that there was such nutritious food, and I couldn’t get it,” she says, recalling one turkey dinner in particular.
“When you’re starving, everything smells so good.”
So when Ms. Montoya transferred to Santa Monica College a couple of years later to study public policy, she was able to pick out the homeless students right away, she says. They were the ones who were “dragging stuff around,” carrying their books in suitcases, showering in the gym.
She decided to help them. Housing seemed too heavy a lift, so she wrote a proposal that called on Santa Monica, a two-year public college, and other California colleges to accept food stamps at campus eateries.
It seemed a modest request. But persuading colleges to embrace the idea was much harder than she expected.
It took her three months to get campus administrators to acknowledge that there were 417 homeless students on campus. One member of the Board of Trustees warned her against making the number public. “They said, ‘Can you imagine what the community would say if they knew that 417 students on campus were homeless?’” she recalls.
Other colleges seemed surprised when she called and asked if they took food stamps. “They all said, ‘Nobody has ever asked us,’” she recalls. “They figured it must not be a problem.” She presented the idea to her college’s Board of Trustees in April 2014, but nothing came of it. Frustrated, she turned to the Roosevelt Institute, a left-leaning think tank that has a network of college clubs. (At the time, she was president of Santa Monica’s chapter.)
The institute put Ms. Montoya in touch with MSNBC, which did a story, and the campaign took off. Other interviews followed, and she decided to take time away from her studies to focus on the fight.
In 2016, she got the attention of a California assemblywoman, Shirley Weber, who introduced a bill that would require food vendors at public and private colleges in eight counties — including Los Angeles — to accept food stamps for hot meals.
When she learned last fall that the bill had been passed and signed into law, “I fell out of bed, literally.”
Leaving college put her career plans on hold. “But if one person can eat who is homeless,” she says, “I’ve done my job.”
Ms. Montoya plans to complete her associate degree this year, and then apply to the University of Southern California to study public relations and public policy for nonprofit groups. She hopes to continue her advocacy work on poverty.
In the meantime, the Roosevelt Institute has connected her with students in other states, who hope to persuade their colleges to follow California’s lead. Her advice to them is simple, but not easy: Get the data on homelessness on your campus.
“If you don’t have the data to back this up, they aren’t going to pay attention to you,” she says. “And if they still don’t, and you have to go to the media, at least you will have the data.”
Kelly Field is a senior reporter covering federal higher-education policy. Contact her at kelly.field@chronicle.com. Or follow her on Twitter @kfieldCHE.
