Mission & Vision
Mission
Through collaboration across CSU campuses, the CSU Palliative Care Pathfinders program provides resources and community support to students who are either caregivers, facing a serious or chronic illness, and/or grieving the loss of a loved one.
Vision
The CSU Palliative Care Pathfinders program provides these students with necessary resources and support, thereby paving the way for them to graduate, fill workforce needs, and achieve social mobility.
Background
How is the Pathfinders Program Related to Palliative Care?
The CSU Palliative Care Pathfinders program supports college students navigating serious illness, caregiving responsibilities, or grief—experiences that fall within the broader scope of palliative care. Palliative care is a specialized approach focused on relieving physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual suffering while helping individuals and their families maintain the best possible quality of life.
An Overlooked and Underserved Student Population
Our Pathfinders program aims to serve an underserved population of students that is larger than most campuses realize. It’s estimated that approximately:
- 32% of U.S. college students live with a series illness.¹ ² ³
- 5 million U.S. college students are family caregivers.¹ ² ³
- 60% of U.S. college students will experience the death of someone close by graduation.¹ ² ³
These students are more likely to face academic challenges, including lower GPAs, learning difficulties, and increased risk of dropping out. Too often these students receive little to no support and, as a result, believe their only option is to pause or end their college education.
Our Approach
The Pathfinders program collaborates with our campus partner offices, to embed this programming into multiple CSU campuses. At each campus, we partner with campus leaders to build a network of support. We provide training for student support personnel and faculty on the impacts of serious illness, caregiving, and grief. In our next phase, we are implementing a peer mentoring program, and corresponding training. Collectively, staff, faculty, and peer mentors will provide much-needed support and resources to students, thereby helping them to find a path to graduation, fill workforce needs, and experience social mobility.
What Are Campus Partners?
The Institute serves as a vital resource for supporting our six CSU campus partners at: Fresno, San Marcos, Monterey Bay, Sonoma, Northridge, and San Jose. Each campus hosts a satellite office of the Institute, led by a faculty director. Our campus partners collaborate with the Institute on a variety of palliative care-related initiatives, such as the CSU Palliative Care Pathfinders program.
Get Involved
While the Institute pursues funding for the next phase, here are a few impactful steps faculty and staff can take now to start supporting Pathfinder students:
1. Acknowledge Challenges Early: Consider starting the semester by surveying your students about potential caregiving, grief, or serious illness challenges. This opens the door for early support and helps faculty connect students to campus and community resources. Acknowledging these challenges can help to validate students’ experiences and encourages them to seek help.
2. Encourage Open Conversation: Use class surveys to better understand students’ roles (e.g., caregiver, employee, parent) and how these may affect their coursework. Faculty can identify support options on campus and address it to the entire class as many students may be reluctant to share their information, even via a confidential survey. These insights can guide conversations around course loads, priorities, and alternatives to taking a break from school, such as reducing units or modifying schedules. If the student brings up leaving the institution, ask them to consider the possibility of slowing down by taking fewer units in a given semester, not stopping their education.
3. Connect Students to Resources:
Help students identify where support is available. Most institutions offer services for physical and mental health through their student health and counseling centers. If you’re unsure of local community resources, encourage the student to contact 211—a free service that connects people to support services in the community (by phone: area code + 211 or website). Be familiar with your campus care networks and local Caregiver Resource Centers, Area Agencies on Aging, and other condition-specific organizations.
We also recommend connecting with your campus’s Faculty Director of the Institute (see our CSU Campus Partners page for who to contact). Faculty Directors can work with their team to point students toward relevant resources and opportunities for support. Additional support is available through our Institute website and our Youth Caregiver website.
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