Commonly, the advice given to students experiencing loneliness is encouraging them to join a student organization or other group. This isn’t necessarily bad advice, but it is definitely not enough. Students experiencing loneliness are generally seeking out connection and support from a social lens, and when we as professionals just encourage joining an organization, it can seem as passing the student off to another group, even if we’re intentional about helping the student find a group that matches to them. As professionals, there are other ways to make sure that students are getting connected in fighting loneliness, and at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities Housing and Residential Life, we are practicing our housing “Groups” model to provide support for students to not just join a group, but to start their own group through a coaching process, allowing even the simplest activities to receive staff and funding support in the effort.
When I went through my onboarding process and began reviewing the Housing Groups page, I had questions. Students can submit a request for a Group, which is highly advertised throughout the building. Upon receiving the request, a housing staff member will be in contact with the student to work with them through logistics of planning and executing an event for a specific group in their community. Looking through the Groups website, I noticed a group that was named the fans of a particular fast food chain. This group met on the last Saturday of each month where they would simply go get food from this fast food restaurant at a defined time together, receiving funding from the department to sponsor this event. I remember thinking, “that’s something we’re spending money on?!?” Yes, it absolutely is.
In the situation of the fast food restaurant fans, I asked how we can legitimize this sort of Group. Most campuses will pour a housing budget into large organizations and individual hall governments to do work to put on large building events, typically as volunteers. As attendance for these organizations drops, we implemented Groups as a way to have students connect through grouped events effectively based on what they want to do. We know that students are starting Groups and putting on events they want to complete, because they are the ones to request the Group, we support it.
We walk students through the process, encourage their advertisement, and provide purchasing power and resources for students to complete their vision for connection. So, instead of a student going by themselves to their favorite fast food chain, getting food with their own money, and going back to their room eating in silence, they can go with others and be in community together. This is significantly more helpful to students than putting on the fifth de-stress event for the whole hall spending a third of the budget on a program yielding less than ten people. The Groups model works because it puts power back in students’ hands to do what they want to do, enabling them to be their own leaders through a coaching structure rather than parliamentary procedures. Instead of asking how to improve engagement through structures that are falling in popularity, consider improving engagement through small scale engagement and utilizing a budget to directly support a student’s desires for what engagement means to them.
Austin Korynta (he/him) is a higher education professional based out of Minnesota. Austin started down the path of working in higher education at his freshman orientation when he boldly told his academic advisor he wanted to drop his intended major and “do what you do.” Since then, Austin has been all-in on housing and residence life experiences across institutions in Iowa, North Carolina, and Illinois prior to settling down in Minnesota. Outside of work, Austin enjoys playing the bass guitar, cooking new recipes, and setting expectations too high for his favorite sports teams.
