History

The Basic Needs Project began in 2019 and did some of the very first research on food and housing insecurity in the Southwest. We collected two years of quantitative and qualitative data at UNM in 2020 and 2021. Our reports gained the attention of the NMHED, and we were asked to collaborate on a statewide assessment of basic needs security. In 2023, we conducted a survey with 27 participating institutions, including 17 two-year institutions, seven four-year institutions, and three tribal institutions. The work is now being done through the collaborative efforts of the BNC. It is guided by an executive leadership team.

The Leadership Team

Dr. Sarita Cargas, D.Phil, Honors College, Human Rights

Dr. Cargas is an Associate Professor of Human Rights in the UNM Honors College. She is also a founder and the principal investigator of the Basic Needs Project (BNP).  The project allows her to apply her human rights interest to college students. Food and housing are basic human rights and are necessary in order for students to achieve a third human right, which is education. The BNP has revealed that there is a substantial portion of students in the US who do not have these three fundamental rights fulfilled. She is on a mission to call attention to this problem. Cargas earned her D.Phil. at Oxford University and has an MST in the Study of Religion from Oxford University, an MA in Theology from Aquinas Institute of Theology, and an MA in Psychology from Georgetown University.

Professor April Land, JD, LLM, School of Law

April Land joined the UNM law faculty in 1997 after devoting most of her career to community lawyering. She teaches primarily in the community lawyering clinic, bringing 12 years of expertise to the position. She spent five years as a staff attorney with the Neighborhood Legal Services Program in Washington, D.C., and as part of her job, she testified before the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights about the difficulty that political refugees, especially children, have in obtaining health-care benefits. Land then received a teaching fellowship at the Georgetown University Law Center's Harrison Institute for Public Law. There, she counseled tenants' associations, microenterprises and other community development organizations, along with teaching students skills and substantive areas of the law in seminars and a clinic.

Basic Needs Consortium team members

Andrew Bride

Housing Researcher

Chloe Uckele

Program Assistant

Gabriel Vallejo

Program Coordinator

UNM BNP in the News

May 2023, Survey finds New Mexico college students facing food, housing insecurity