Addressing Community College Students' Basic Needs (In)Security Through Mutual Aid as Pedagogy

Community colleges are characterized by serving an incredibly diverse student population. Many community college students have unmet basic needs, as many as 61% of students by some accounts. Within this practice brief, I outline how mutual aid could be used pedagogically within the community college classroom to (a) address students' unmet basic needs and (b) engage students in critical pedagogy to cultivate a deeper understanding of why those basic needs are unmet in the first place, thereby equipping students with the knowledge and skills needed to address and redress the systems and forces that create and perpetuate basic needs insecurity.