who may not be comfortable coming to a staff member and identifying that they have a food need. And so we have a WeCare initiative that we developed on campus. And WeCare for us, is covering information that relates to making sure students have the ability to have shelter, have food, have clothes if they're going for an interview and have tons of great things that support them. If a student has identified a response that they are in a situation where they could benefit from those WeCare initiatives, we have our assistant director in our Center for Civic and Community Engagement who oversees WeCare, reach out to those students. Last semester, over half of the students who indicated that they had a food need got connected to our food pantry on campus who otherwise would not have been connected to the services and the resources that we have at Ramapo. And they were, we use that information to have our multicultural student programs and services office reach out directly to that student. This was a first year student. So they'd only been on campus six weeks. And in the past, we had no way of identifying students that weren't feeling a sense of belonging on our campus. And so we were able to use that specific data point to reach out to them and have them come in, meet other students, and get a sense of the kinds of resources there. And we identified 20 students who were having housing insecurity and sent them to our DCC Cares office which has several grants for housing insecure students. We connected the student with that office and within days they were in our residence hall no longer housing insecure, directly because of the questions We can see quickly which students are at high risk who's at low risk and moderate risk. And depending on which driver that we're looking at, at that particular moment. So if we're interested in students in financial distress, it's a quick and easy way for us to take a look at that. And that's actually a really good example of how we do fund raising and we try to connect the students who are in financial distress to our donors. We are a veteran serving institution. And so we did a custom campaign where we reached out to see how they were doing and realized that about two dozen of them were in financial need. So we connected them, we have some emergency relief funding that we connected the veterans specifically to. And they were so appreciative of one, being acknowledged as veterans, but two, understanding that beyond going to school, they had other challenges. And so we're very grateful to be able to help them in that way.
