How Colleges Are Supporting Students Leaving Abusive Relationships

“Grow your own” programs, like Reach University’s, are working to address teacher shortages, particularly in rural areas, by recruiting school employees who don’t have college or education degrees and giving them a chance to earn an undergraduate degree in education at just $75 a month. Participants take courses online and take 15 hours out of their work week to spend time observing and training in classrooms. So far 84% of all parishes across the state have signed up to take Reach trainees, which could put a significant dent in the statewide teacher vacancy issue.

Casa Mía provides housing and support services for pregnant women and new mothers struggling with addiction. The program is run out of an old house and is currently home to nine women. Staff at Casa Mía provide mental health care, recovery resources and work to destigmatize substance abuse to prevent mothers from losing their children to the foster care system.

Programs like Panthers Forward are working to help students and their families understand, prepare for and afford the cost of a university education. Group members can receive up to $5,000 of federal student loan debt relief and can also attend networking events, mentor discussions and access financial wellness resources. 150 students are accepted into the program each year.

The Umthombo Youth Development Foundation helps to produce rural healthcare workers by helping students from rural schools enter the health field, getting work in hospitals from the areas where they grew up. The Foundation has produced 528 healthcare professionals, working across 16 different disciplines.

The UGA Garden works with Trader Joe’s to gather viable produce the grocery chain gets rid of each Sunday. Student workers go through the food each week, compost what has gone bad, and use the rest to make meals for those in need. The organizations has gathered over 330,000 pounds of food so far and deliver over 700 meals per month.

The Fainbarg-Chase Thrive Center food pantry provides Santa Ana College students with a daily snack and one free bag of groceries per week. The food pantry sees about 80 to 90 students daily and offers monthly cooking demos over Zoom.

California Students Vote Project, a public-private partnership, encourages college students to vote. Covid-19-adjusted strategies include sending out multiple emails, using social media, and encouraging peer-to-peer contacts to inform students about how to register to vote and the ways they can actually cast their ballots. Group representatives also visit Zoom classrooms to share information and some students have organized virtual events, such as political trivia night, to foster student engagement. Over 65,000 California students have registered to vote since August, triple the number from all of 2016.

Domestic violence victims often suffer in silence and do not have encouragement to find help. San Luis Obispo in California has created a program RISE that trains primary care physicians to identify signs of domestic abuse and collaborates with clinics to treat and rehabilitate victims. The Affordable Care Act provides coverage for domestic violence screenings, offering financial incentives to help get victims the help that they need.

More than one million service members, veterans and their families take college courses financed with federal tax dollars. Their experiences are more complicated than those of their fresh-faced civilian peers, leading entities to explore the most effective ways to ensure they graduate.

The University of Arizona's student-run CUP women's clinic provides free preventive and primary care to uninsured Southern Arizona women. In 2025, they served 61 unique patients, a 35% increase from the prior year, and trained future physicians in community-based medicine and health equity.