During the 2016-2017 school year, the Brothers to Sisters Club at Compton College reserved a portion of their meetings for “Real Talk.” This allowed students to share their current feelings and experiences. During one of these meetings, two students spoke up and shared that they were homeless.
This moment inspired Joshua Jackson and Dayshawn Louden, then student leaders at Compton College, to begin campaigning and advocating for student housing and increased basic needs on campus.
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During the 2016-2017 school year, the Brothers to Sisters Club at Compton College reserved a portion of their meetings for “Real Talk.” This allowed students to share their current feelings and experiences. During one of these meetings, two students spoke up and shared that they were homeless.
This moment inspired Joshua Jackson and Dayshawn Louden, then student leaders at Compton College, to begin campaigning and advocating for student housing and increased basic needs on campus.
“Immediately, Dayshawn and I went into planning,” says Jackson,
Eight years later, Compton College is breaking ground on a 250+ bed housing facility, becoming the first community college in Los Angeles County to offer campus housing to its students.
CCCD Student Housing Rendering
“It was a great conversation when they first brought it forward, and their question was, ‘How do we do it,” says Curry in an interview with Diverse. “I give them the credit for it because they got me to think about it differently and what we could do. I’m a former student activist, so seeing student activists seeing what we need was good.”
Jackson and Louden had just begun their roles as Compton College’s Associated Student Body President and Vice President when they approached Curry.
“We were motivated, and I think we felt that space gave us the courage to believe that we could create change,” says Jackson. “Our roles also gave us the conviction that we should.”
Rallying The Community
After their conversation with Curry, the student leaders called on their community at Compton College for support. Under Curry’s leadership, their efforts grew into a larger task force committed to addressing housing, food, and basic needs for the student body. Their next step was to identify Compton College students who identified as homeless.
“We took it upon ourselves,” says Louden. “I recall me and Joshua going into classrooms to say, ‘hey, utilize your voice,’ because the school can’t address a problem if there’s no need for it.”
Louden says that their roles as campus leaders positioned them to advocate for their fellow students and the longevity of the institution.
“Housing was like a five-to-six-year plan, but to address the needs that we could see that Compton College had, we pushed for a pantry, opening the showers that were going unused by the football team, and supplying bathroom kits and supplies,” he says.
Within weeks, Compton College began implementing additional programs designed to serve students’ needs.
Dr. Keith Curry
Curry, who previously served as the Dean of Student Services at Compton College and has been instrumental in the college’s growth, success, and rebuilding, says that his role in this process was to also be courageous.
“I announced at one of our professional development days the need to build student housing, and I think people were like, ‘What is he talking about,’” he recalls. “I said, ‘we’ll be the first ones to build housing,’ and sometimes you have to dream. Sometimes you have to say stuff and get people united because you said it.”
Curry also became one of the founding chairpersons of the Chief Executive Officers of the California Community Colleges’ Affordability, Food & Housing Access Taskforce in spring 2018. This group provides system-wide recommendations to address housing and food insecurities for California Community College students.
“I was advocating statewide for basic needs, so then I was able to fold in that advocacy to include food and also housing,” says Curry.
Once Compton College gathered all of the data and support they needed, college leaders submitted a proposal. Curry, however, was intentional about the request.
“I think the most important piece to this was we didn’t ask for the planning grant,” remembers Curry. “We went directly for the project funding grant. We went for the entire dollar amount, and that was the strategic plan.”
Over the course of about five years, what began as a conversation in a student club meeting eventually became a reality.
Celebrating In Community
In June 2022, California lawmakers moved to include a student housing grant totaling $80,389,000 in the 2022-2023 State Budget for the Compton Community College District to build their proposed 250+ bed student housing facility.
“We proved our critics wrong,” says Curry, who has emerged as a national thought-leader on community colleges. “When we’re talking about student housing and having conversations, we were able to take a dream that some people thought was not possible and made it possible for the community that we serve.”
The Compton College Housing Project Groundbreaking Ceremony took place last month, a win that those involved hope to share with the entire Compton community and Compton Community College District (CCCD).
“We’re serving Black and Brown individuals within our community, and for me, it gives these students hope,” says Curry. “They can see a college campus that looks like a four-year college with new facilities but also with student housing. That means that they will not be looked at as less than.”
Phase one of the 86,000-square-foot building will include three floors of affordable student living quarters with 100 percent occupancy designated for students in need. The facility will provide three types of living configurations: 50 double-room units with access to shared bathrooms and common spaces, 50 double-suite units with bathrooms and access to common spaces, and 50 studio units for single occupants. The student housing will also include study areas, lounges and shared kitchens.
“We’re showing other colleges that this can be done,” says Curry. “Compton is the model for that. When you think about our history, we’re the first community college in the state of California whose accreditation was revoked, and to go from that in 2006 to be where we’re at now and to be on the cutting edge, that tells you that transformation can happen, but transformation can happen in communities where we look like the students.”
Curry marks this moment as one of hope, not just for Compton but for communities of color all over the country.
“We’re always criticizing what we don’t do in our communities. Now we see what we can do, and that gives people hope that change is coming,” he says. “But also, this gives the students the opportunity to say look at my backyard, and my community college matters.”
Big things have been on the horizon for Compton College for some time now. Just last year, rapper Kendrick Lamar surprised 2024 Compton College graduating students as their graduation speaker.
“If you look at our video from graduation, you can see the words from Kendrick Lamar where he talks about the value of our degree and how important it is and what it means to be a Compton College graduate,” says Curry. “It gives our students hope. When you’re told you’re not good enough, and now you see a college in your community that is doing stuff that makes you proud, that means you know you’re a part of something that’s bigger than us.”
Phase one is just the beginning of Compton College 2035, a comprehensive master plan outlining the college’s plans to provide students with state-of-the-art facilities, including a physical education complex and a visual and performing arts complex, over the next decade and beyond.
“The city is already going up, as you can imagine why, but this is another notch to add under the belt of why Compton is just a historic and beautiful place,” says Jackson.
Serving As A Model For Other Community Colleges In California And Beyond
In addition to Compton College being the first community college in LA County to have student housing, the housing project is also the first prefabricated modular student housing project that is design-approved by the California Division of the State Architect.
A prefabricated modular means that most of the building will be built thousands of miles away.
“It’s a unique project,” says David Lelie, senior project manager with Gafcon, the construction management company managing the project. “They’re going to build them in a factory in Idaho, and then they’re going to ship them by truck to our site and use a crane to place them.”
This model is designed to decrease construction time and disruptions.
“What we’re saving is sustainability and time nuisance for the students,” says Lelie. “So, instead of bugging students for two years, you’re dropping all those modules into place in two weeks.”
Once the building is placed on campus, the exterior and final touches will be completed, which is projected to be done by May 2027. This will save about six months of traditional construction time.
“It’s a seed, and eventually other campuses will use this idea and this method of prefab modular in order to build their student housing,” says Lelie. “Yes, we’re housing 250 students, but now other colleges, especially in California, can take this model and replicate it, and every time you replicate it, it’s like a car, they get less and less expensive.”
HPI, which is the architecture company responsible for some of the first non-modular student housing on community college campuses, took on this project to continue building cutting-edge experiences and homes for community college students.
They wanted the design to provide not only a place to sleep but also academic support and integration into the broader campus.
“As we learned about how to deliver modular student housing, it was really taking the program that [Compton College] had already established in terms of number of beds and the types of beds and then looking at how we could do that in a way that created community,” says Larry Frapell, principal and president of HPI architecture.
“We wanted the amenities to be easy to get to, a combination of both indoor and outdoor spaces, and a sense of security.”
HPI has a long history of serving higher education and, specifically, larger community colleges.
“We have a good understanding of not only the need for housing but how housing relates to community college students and how to integrate that in a community college campus,” says Frapell. “It’s part of a greater campus and part of a greater community, so we hope that this becomes a home for students and that this is a desirable place to live.”
Jackson and Louden are proud of the legacy they left to be continued for generations to come. Jackson says that he recently spoke with the two students who inspired the project’s advocacy.
“They’re housed, and they’re happy,” he says. “So, I’m grateful to be a part of history in this regard. I’m grateful for what I call following a tradition of activism that’s taking place at Compton College and just through our history as Black folks generally. We didn’t know it at the time, but that’s what we were doing. We just wanted to help.”
Louden believes now, more than ever, that Compton’s faith in humanity is one of its superpowers.
“Compton made that choice as an institution to restore faith in humanity,” says Louden, “and in the words of Compton College’s late great Dr. Joseph Lewis, ‘Compton makes the world go around.’”
