Helping Students Thrive: Meeting Basic Needs

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.

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.

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.

Apologizing Well. Understanding how to apologize well builds trust, demonstrates responsibility, and helps students grow personally and socially throughout their college experience.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Managing the Medication Discussion. Understanding the challenges to medication cost, access to providers, compliance, and consistency when taking medication.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Pronoun Usage. Understand why pronouns are important as they relate to gender identity, expression, and the separate issues of sexual orientation. Download our gender expression terminology guide.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.