Students in Homelessness Course Hone Advocacy Skills at State House.
Students in Homelessness Course Hone Advocacy Skills at State House
Students in Harold Cox’s course on homelessness visited the State House to better understand how they can effect policy changes to protect the health of vulnerable populations, such as people experiencing homelessness.
With an overall life expectancy as much as 30 years less than the general population, people experiencing homelessness are among society’s most vulnerable members. Unhoused individuals face major challenges in meeting their basic needs, including higher rates of food insecurity, unemployment, poverty, social isolation, interpersonal violence, and discrimination. They also deal with numerous other barriers to well-being, including higher prevalence of substance use and mental health disorders, and a greater occurrence of chronic physical illnesses like tuberculosis and HIV/AIDS. With growing housing insecurity caused by rapidly rising rents and declining public assistance nationwide, homelessness has been characterized as a public health emergency, but few public health programs offer a dedicated course on the subject.
A New Educational Offering
Seeking to change this, the Department of Community Health Sciences at the School of Public Health debuted a new course last fall titled Homelessness: Stories, Solutions, and Advocacy (SB745). The course provides an overview of how current policies affect the unhoused population and presents communication strategies public health practitioners and regular citizens alike can use to advance evidence-based interventions.
“Because our school sits right near Mass and Cass, our students see the realities [of homelessness] up close. Many students come in wanting to understand the issues beyond the headlines.”
Harold Cox, Professor of the Practice in Community Health Sciences
Harold Cox, a professor of the practice in community health sciences, developed and teaches the fledgling course. A former social worker and long-time volunteer at a men’s homeless shelter and food pantry, Cox has frequently engaged with people experiencing homelessness both in his professional and personal life. He has written about the issue on several occasions, and each fall, as part of new student orientation, he provides an overview of the complexities of homelessness in Boston to matriculants to the on-campus MPH program.
The BU Medical Campus, home to SPH, is adjacent to Boston Health Care for the Homeless Program and Boston Medical Center, where unhoused individuals often access healthcare. It is also a few blocks from the intersection of Massachusetts Avenue and Melnea Cass Boulevard, otherwise known as “Mass and Cass,” which is considered the epicenter of the city’s homelessness and substance use crises.
“Because our school sits right near Mass and Cass, our students see the realities [of homelessness] up close. Many students come in wanting to understand the issues beyond the headlines,” says Cox. The challenge is often a subject of discussion among local politicians, and while the city has taken a variety of approaches to improve the situation over the years, it remains a near-constant reality of life in the neighborhood.
“The People Behind the Policies”
Regardless of the specific concentration of their studies or aspirations after graduation, Cox believes it is important that public health students understand the myriad root causes of homelessness and the consequences these difficult circumstances have for health. He is optimistic that students who enroll in SB745 can begin to make a difference in the lives of their Mass and Cass neighbors simply by showing up and taking the time to get to know them.
“Good and effective public health programming always starts with this kind of respectful engagement and empathetic understanding,” wrote Cox in a recent reflection on the lessons he has learned serving meals to shelter guests. Cox has gleaned so much value from his time in shelter kitchens that he made meal service the first assignment of SB745.
“What I hope [the students] carry with them is a clearer sense of the people behind the policies. I want them to have a deeper understanding of the humanity of those experiencing homelessness themselves,” says Cox. “I want them to have the confidence that they can help move us toward a more just and humane system.”
The evidence to date shows Cox and SPH students are on the same page. The on-campus MPH students enrolled in the fall 2025 section of SB745—the School’s second-ever offering of the course—are studying a variety of different subjects, including epidemiology and biostatistics, health communication and promotion; health policy and law; global health program design, monitoring, and evaluation, and Community Assessment, Program Design, Implementation, and Evaluation (CAPDIE). Across disciplines, however, the students give similar reasons for why they were drawn to take a course on homelessness: Cox and the proximity of SPH to the epicenter of a real-world public health challenge.
Student Perspectives
Anna Stevens, a dual-degree student in the Master of Social Work and MPH programs at BU, cites two main factors in her decision.
“Primarily, I was very motivated to enroll in [a] course with Professor Cox. He is an exceptional lecturer and facilitator, and makes course content accessible, engaging, and relevant,” she says. “Secondly, I was driven to learn more about the history behind the pervasive problem of homelessness in the United States and how communities and governments have attempted to address this crisis. I was also motivated to understand more about the services that Boston provides to its homeless populations, and how Boston University, through proximity or direct services, supports populations that congregate around the Mass & Cass area.”
Raj Kundu, a student in BU’s 4+1 program earning both a bachelor’s degree in psychology and an MPH, echoes Stevens’ sentiments.
“[Professor Cox] has been a very big inspiration to me to continue pursuing public health,” says Kundu. “And seeing the way he interacts with former students and colleagues, I can tell he’s had a very positive impact on them, too. I think everyone could benefit from this class, not only because the advocacy skills are transferable to other causes, but because it is an issue that is pervasive in every community and has a lot of history we don’t really acknowledge in other spaces.”
Becca Spaulding, an MPH student studying CAPDIE, hopes to one day conduct her own research informing the development of interventions for people experiencing chronic homelessness, a population sometimes called “rough sleepers.” For Spaulding, the availability of a course on homelessness was instrumental in her decision to attend SPH.
“I mainly chose BUSPH because of its emphasis on social justice,” she says, “but learning BU had a course in homelessness really sealed the deal for me. I had a particularly formative experience with unhoused people in my community in 2020, and I haven’t been able to look away from the issue since. Between the course and BU’s proximity to homeless services in Boston, I thought it would be a great place to get involved in this space.”
Advocacy 101
The SB745 syllabus contains a variety of projects designed to give students real-world experience with homelessness. Through a combination of lectures, workshops, discussions, readings, and guest speakers, students deepen their understanding of the nuances of the problem and its effects not only on the unhoused but their families and the practitioners who seek to serve them.
For example, the 15 on-campus MPH students enrolled in the fall 2025 section of SB745—the School’s second-ever offering of the course—recently recorded their own mock legislative testimony. One of several assignments designed to harness the power of storytelling to capture the attention of lawmakers, the mock legislative testimony required the students to craft persuasive narratives either in support of or opposition to a proposed city policy change based on its effects on homelessness. The students then took a field trip to the Massachusetts State House to further hone their advocacy skills.
Brianna Silva, senior manager of advocacy and membership for the Massachusetts chapter of the National Association of Social Workers (NASW), delivered a crash course in the legislative process while guiding the students through the building. She also highlighted to students two bills from NASW’s policy agenda that relate to housing justice and are currently being considered by the Massachusetts legislature: S.961/H.1488 An Act Codifying into Law the RAFT Program (Rental Assistance for Families in Transition) and S.2399/H.3750 An Act to Provide Identification to Youth and Adults Experiencing Homelessness. After the tour, the students had the opportunity to pose their questions about the role of advocacy in the legislative process to Cassie Tobin, a legislative aid in the office of Representative Daniel Hunt.
Both Silva and Tobin emphasized to the students the indispensable role they play as constituents in a democratic system. They reminded the students of the power they hold to drive policy change by communicating their priorities to their representatives. With just one session of the course remaining, the students will now apply the insights they have accumulated throughout the semester to propose a systems-level approach to address homelessness.
With just one session of the course remaining, the students’ final assignment is to apply the insights they have accumulated throughout the semester to write a one-page paper “solving homelessness,” says Cox, grinning cheekily.
