By Tessa Schmitz and Padra Lor, student writers, Institute for Community Engagement and Scholarship
When the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a pandemic on March 11, 2020, perhaps no one could foresee how it would drastically alter our lives. In the beginning, there was a seeming collective uncertainty fueled with optimism and hope for a short-lived virus, but this wonder was soon replaced as the severity of the coronavirus revealed itself. An array of difficulties—serious physical health consequences, emotional fatigue, political unrest, and economic stress—have continuously impacted our communities, including college students.
Like institutions of higher education across the country, Metro State received funding through the U.S. Department of Education’s Higher Education Emergency Relief Fund (HEERF) III: The American Rescue Plan (ARP) Act of 2021. These funds, appropriated by congress, provided direct financial relief to students, and assisted institutions to respond to the conditions of the pandemic. When reviewing the implementation guidelines, Metro State President Ginny Arthur noted a clause specifying that the institutional portion of funds (non-student relief) may “be used to pay students for internships and job training experiences that are aligned with local coronavirus-related recovery needs.” The president tasked a small group convened by the Institute for Community Engagement and Scholarship to propose an application to employ funds in this way. To reach local communities with the university’s pandemic recovery actions, the group recommended a program that would demonstrate our commitment to community engagement by investing funds in workforce trainees in critical, frontline fields most impacted by the pandemic, while providing further direct relief to students. To achieve this, the group proposed a project to identify, qualify, and compensate students performing unpaid, credit-bearing internships, clinicals, practicum, and field work.
President Arthur agreed that applying funding to compensate work experiences would provide greater stability and security to students whose continued enrollment has become increasingly precarious during the pandemic. The initiative was granted $750,000 to fund students through job training experiences focused on pandemic relief in Fall 2021, Spring 2022, and Summer 2022. A team from the Institute for Community Engagement and Scholarship facilitated the application process and, with the support of financial management, continued to manage and support the program.
“If I were to rename this grant, I’d call it the ‘Love Up’ grant,” says Victor Cole, who served as the initiative’s lead. “We love up people: to the next level, the next challenge, the next step. I really see this as the university just loving up the students to the next thing—graduation, jobs, licensures, the finish line.”
And the finish line is just ahead for senior Habibo Kalifa, a recipient of the American Rescue Plan internship initiative, who graduated this May with a bachelor’s in alcohol and drug counseling. To earn their counseling licensure, students are required to complete an intensive 880 hours of often unpaid clinical field work before graduation. Kalifa began these hours in August 2021 at Fairview Treatment Center’s Lodging Plus within the center’s residential program. “It has been so rewarding,” Kalifa says as she reflects on her time there.
Kalifa has always been passionate about providing care to others and had previously worked as an elementary school aide to students on individualized learning plans. But when she witnessed a loved one battle substance abuse, Kalifa felt compelled to pursue Metro’s Alcohol and Drug Counseling undergraduate program. “I never thought I would do something like this,” she notes, but as she stepped into her first class, she knew she made the right choice. As a Muslim American, “nobody in the classroom looked like me. It was a motivator.”
Living just three blocks from where George Floyd was murdered in 2020, Kalifa felt and watched the weight of grief, rage, and fear anguish her community. “Our peace of mind was disrupted,” Kalifa says. And the pandemic only intensified the pain, especially for Black, Brown, Indigenous, and other marginalized groups already experiencing education, health, and financial disparities. Kalifa’s mother was laid off, and Kalifa started to work sixteen-hour days—half of which were for her unpaid internship.
When she opened an email from the Institute for Community Engagement and Scholarship regarding the American Rescue Plan funding opportunity, she decided to apply and was awarded funding. Kalifa’s position at Lodging Plus has been especially crucial during this time with the nation’s increased demand for mental health and recovery services. “The program was overwhelmed, because the pandemic has increased the use of chemicals and unfortunately many people have relapsed too,” she says. She notes that unemployment, loneliness, localized grief, and uncertainty all play into the increase in substance use.
As Kalifa reflects on her year leading people to recovery, she smiles. “This experience has wrapped up everything I’ve learned. It taught me that people cannot do this alone.” She pauses before adding: “I hope that we’re all out of business one day … that there are no more addicts.”
Another funding recipient, Chris Buerkle, is a student in the Master of Anesthesia program at Metro State. Though he started clinicals in fall 2021, Buerkle had already experienced the impact of COVID in healthcare. With a program prerequisite of nursing experience, Buerkle had worked as an ICU nurse since the beginning of the pandemic. “As anesthesia providers, we help push through the volume of surgeries and get things done in the OR (operating room) to help alleviate the backlog that hospitals are experiencing right now,” shares Buerkle. “Whether its direct care with COVID patients or if it’s just getting hundreds of knee replacements that haven’t been done because people were out with COVID; we really help keep the surgical volume moving through.” During the height of the pandemic and even now when cases have slowed down, hospitals are constantly dealing with the unpredictable. Hundreds of students who are completing clinicals in a healthcare setting, like Buerkle, are doing all they can to make sure that things run smoothly and that patients receive care.
Buerkle shared that the ARP funds helped him worry less about money, “These (academic) programs are not cheap and helped reduce the amount of loans that I would have to take out.” Not only did it lessen the financial stress that Buerkle would have to go through during his clinicals, but it also allowed him the flexibility to attend a professional conference in Chicago furthering his academic and career networks.
At the end of funding cycle, student recipients, including Kalifa and Buerkle, completed an ARP funding evaluation, and nearly all students affirmed the program’s benefits. The funding added financial stability, reduced stress and anxiety, allowed students to focus on their learning, and plan for graduation and beyond. In total, the program was able to disperse $659,613 to 509 students during the 2021–2022 school year, some of whom received funding multiple semesters. The recipients reflected a broad range of majors from art to nursing and the diversity of disciplines reflects the way that COVID impacted all sectors of our communities and the significant contributions Metro students made to support pandemic relief.
While the ARP funding provided much needed support to so many students and contributed to our community-wide effort to tackle the novel virus, financial support for students in their field placements, internships, and job training experiences remain. A recent article from Inside Higher Ed cites the prevalent inequities that unpaid learning experiences create and efforts to address it. As Buerkle notes, the ARP funding was a big help, but he wishes that all students who are in clinicals and internships received funding or compensation. “The traditional model is unpaid work because you are learning but think in this role, I'm actually doing the work while being instructed and critiqued. I feel like we’re doing the actual work. It’d be nice to be paid even a small stipend for the work as it alleviates stress, especially for lower income students, with the rising cost of school and living.”