ABSTRACT
Although students with children comprise a large percentage of food-insecure students at colleges and universities, few studies investigate how student-parents navigate food insecurity nor how institutions respond to these students’ needs. This study fills that gap. We draw on interviews with different stakeholders at one university to examine the delivery of institutional supports for food-insecure students and the ways in which they acknowledge or erase food-insecure student-parents’ multiple identities. We explore the discrepancies among expectations and perceptions of effectiveness across these stakeholders using composite narratives, allowing us to build, through one story, a representative account of the experiences of informants while maintaining anonymity. Using Martin’s approach to different views of organisational culture as a theoretical lens, we identified a discrepancy between institutional rhetoric and actions on meeting the needs of food-insecure student-parents. This discrepancy illustrates the fragmentation that exists among campus stakeholders; not all groups perceive the culture similarly – nor do they necessarily perceive the need to strive to transform it.
