Jim Lo Scalzo/AP/File

President Trump, flanked by Vice President Mike Pence and House Speaker Paul Ryan, gives an address to a joint session of Congress on Feb. 28, 2017. Many commentators, even on the left, judged that speech to be ’presidential.’

A less-familiar version of President Trump is expected to take the podium for his first State of the Union address Tuesday night.

Call him Teleprompter Trump – the version who mostly sticks to the script, can be a bit stilted, and meets the standard definition of “presidential.” Twitter Trump, who regularly sends unfiltered and at times provocative messages to his more than 47 million followers, will be on hold. So, too, will Campaigner Trump, who won the 2016 election and still throws red meat to raucous crowds at rallies around the country.

Therein lies a central feature of this presidency: Mr. Trump’s ability to switch from one persona to the other, by turns reassuring the political establishment and then turning it on its head. The effect can be disruptive and contradictory, but it’s all part of the essential Trump. And on Tuesday night, by deploying the conventional Teleprompter Trump, he can help himself, analysts say.

“Trump was elected to be a disruptor – but people don’t want constant disruption,” says Ari Fleischer, press secretary in the George W. Bush White House. “His teleprompter speeches have won him plaudits… They show that governing is not the same as campaigning.”

Even many Republicans agree that teleprompter speeches are not Trump’s preferred method of communicating – and they often come across as flat and low-energy.

“This president … treats a prepared text, a prepared speech, like a straitjacket from which he cannot escape,” conservative columnist Peggy Noonan observed on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” last week, after watching Trump address world leaders at Davos. Ms. Noonan, who wrote some of President Reagan’s most soaring speeches, added: “He finally gets through it – then he sits down, does an interview, does a Q and A, and becomes Donald Trump again.”

Compared with Trump’s free-wheeling campaign-style appearances, his first State of the Union address may even be a tad boring, in the way that any president delivering an hour-long list of accomplishments and proposals can be. But in a way, that’s exactly the point.

“What you expect him to do in this environment is to act in a way befitting the office,” says Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania. “It’s a moment that elevates the president’s role, because the other branches are there witnessing the speech.”

A ‘unifying’ speech

Administration officials previewing Trump’s speech promise an approach similar to his upbeat address to a joint session of Congress last February, for which he won plaudits even from some liberal Democrats. That speech came in stark contrast to his inaugural address a month earlier, in which he presented a bleak picture of “American carnage.”

Now, a year later, Trump has a record to defend and talk up, as well as an agenda for the year ahead to lay out. The tone toward Congress “will be one of bipartisanship,” said a Trump aide speaking to reporters on background. And to the American people, the official added, the tone will be “optimistic” and “unifying.”

“It is unifying around the greater opportunities for all Americans as a result of the last year's jobs growth and success in the economy,” the official said, noting that the speech will also tout tax reform, deregulation, and the booming stock market.

In addition, Trump will preview his agenda for the year ahead – including a $1 trillion-plus plan for infrastructure; the framework for immigration reform the White House unveiled last week; America’s place in international trade; the opioid crisis; and national security, with special focus on the North Korean nuclear threat.

On its face, this year’s address has the makings of a typical laundry-list State of the Union, in which the various agencies vie for, and often succeed in getting, a mention of their issues and projects.

But this is no ordinary president, and while his aides have promised a unifying address, there’s no predicting what Trump may do in unscripted asides, or what others in the audience may do. Several Democratic members of Congress are boycotting the event, while others are bringing guests aimed at delivering a message – such as the wife of a Michigan “Dreamer” who was recently deported.

Then there are the Democrats who may be tempted to heckle – as Rep. Joe Wilson (R) of South Carolina did to President Obama during a 2009 speech on health care to a joint session of Congress. Congressman Wilson yelled out “You lie!”

The incident marked a milestone in the steady erosion of decorum in Washington, and analysts say they wouldn’t be surprised if a Democrat decided to act out on Tuesday. How Trump would react is anybody’s guess, but an attack from the left could be a gift to him, as one who has built his political brand on fighting back. With the November midterms approaching, and the battle for control of Congress – particularly the House – already hot, partisan feelings are strong.

That, says Mr. Fleischer, is why this year’s State of the Union is so important to Trump, as an opportunity before a national audience to widen his support.

“President Trump needs to broaden his base and govern for more people, not just some people,” Fleischer says.

The importance of the annual State of the Union message to Congress is elevated by the fact that it is required by the US Constitution. To many Americans, watching the speech represents a civic duty, regardless of party affiliation. And therein lies Trump’s opportunity.

“It’s a speech to celebrate the accomplishments that his base appreciates, but also to widen the audience to include those who might come to appreciate the accomplishments, if they are well presented,” says Ms. Jamieson.

What constitutes ‘presidential’ 

Some Trump critics are warning the media and analysts up front not to get carried away by one well-done – or even non-controversial – State of the Union speech.

“Memo to journalists and pundits … who will comment after the State of the Union: a president reading from a teleprompter for 45 minutes without melting down does not make him presidential,” pundit Norman Ornstein tweeted Sunday. By Monday afternoon, the comment had more than 8,500 retweets and 24,000 likes.

Even if Trump’s first State of the Union speech goes off without a hitch, and Teleprompter Trump prevails, there’s little doubt that the “other” Trumps will be back soon enough. Twitter Trump is likely to have something noteworthy to say Wednesday morning. And Campaigner Trump will reemerge at his next rally.

As a former reality TV star, Trump knows the importance of mixing things up to keep the show interesting, says Walter Podrazik, a lecturer on communications at the University of Illinois, Chicago.

“This is someone who knows how to pace a TV season,” says Mr. Podrazik, co-author of the book “Watching TV.” “He’s a TV veteran, and that’s why those different tools of communication are important.”

When Ukraine's parliament, the Rada, overwhelmingly passed a bill 10 days ago that fundamentally redefines the country’s war against pro-Russian separatists in the restive East, it promised a much harder line out of Kiev regarding the conflict.

That drew immediate rebuke from Russia. Moscow cast the bill, which Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko supports and is expected to sign soon, as a declaration of war, noting that its passage coincides with a US decision to provide Kiev with lethal weapons.

But Ukrainian experts say the motives for the bill are rooted much closer to home: the country’s upcoming parliamentary elections, which must be held this year, and Ukrainian presidential polls slated for March 2019. Public opinion surveys suggest Mr. Poroshenko’s popularity is around 10 percent, on a par with his rival, Yulia Tymoshenko, who has been holding a more militantly anti-Russian line. With the new bill, Poroshenko can leapfrog Ms. Tymoshenko in the polls by posing as a “war president” who refuses to compromise with the enemy.

But the cost, critics say, is that the bill completely sidelines the European and Russian-backed Minsk Agreements as a path to peace in the troubled region. By recasting the conflict, they say, Ukraine is apparently jettisoning outside mediation through the Minsk accords, which risks alienating already exasperated Europeans and closing off the only currently existent mechanism for peacefully ending the unrest in the East.

“Poroshenko's powers as chief commander are bolstered under the law, and all security forces are now to be subordinated directly to him,” says Vadim Karasyov, director of the Kiev-based Institute of Global Strategies, an independent think tank. “The top-down power vertical has been strengthened, and a clear political and diplomatic message has been sent: there is no conflict between Kiev and [the rebel region of] Donetsk, but there is one between Kiev and Moscow, even if there is no hope of resolving it.”

A plan for reintegration?

For almost four years, Ukrainian forces have made war against pro-Russian forces under the awkward rubric of an “anti-terrorist operation.” The new law would abolish any suggestion that the enemy might be anti-Kiev Ukrainians, and labels the rebel republics of Donetsk and Luhansk as “temporarily occupied territories” for which Russia is entirely responsible.

The Minsk accords outlined a detailed procedure through which Donetsk and Luhansk would receive “special status,” hold internationally-recognized elections, and then negotiate their reintegration into Ukraine directly with Kiev, including basic constitutional reforms to federalize the country. No substantive steps have ever been undertaken by either side to implement these terms, and the new “Donbass Integration Law” now makes clear that Kiev expects the country to be re-united on its terms alone, though probably not anytime soon.

Ukrainian lawmakers, who overwhelmingly passed the bill on Jan. 19, argue that it simply normalizes a situation that has long existed but was clouded by misleading jargon and official fealty to the non-functioning Minsk accords. For his part, Poroshenko denies that the bill contradicts the Minsk process at all.

Denis Balibouse/Reuters

Ukraine's President Petro Poroshenko attends the World Economic Forum (WEF) annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland, on Jan. 26.

“The way things have been done in the past now has a clear legal basis,” says pro-Poroshenko Rada deputy Olexander Chernenko. “It's a plan for reintegration, even if it can’t be done right now. The aggressor is finally named, and it is Russia.”

Though fighting has indeed intensified in one of the world’s most forgotten combat zones in recent days, few expect the spring to bring a return to the all-out warfare that has killed over 10,000 people in the past four years. Instead, Kiev’s apparent repudiation of the Minsk-mandated road to reintegration has many convinced that the bruising low-level trench warfare of the past years will just drag on, freezing the conflict indefinitely.

Kiev cut off pensions and other state payments to the rebel republics’ 3 million inhabitants years ago, and last year effectively ended all trade with the region. The bill states that Russia is entirely responsible for the population’s welfare and any reconstruction of the war-ravaged territories.

“It's pretty clear that they are not open to any kind of compromises in Kiev,” says Kirill Cherkashin, a political scientist with Donetsk National University, in the rebel republic. “They are not interested in the opinions of the people living here, nor in following the Minsk agreements. So, people here look forward to the situation deteriorating, with no improvement in sight.”

'No war, no peace'

For Russia, and its European partners in the Minsk process, the challenge will be to resuscitate the Minsk process, or find some new means of addressing the conflict. For Moscow, it will be much harder now that Kiev has officially named it as the enemy, while under the terms of Minsk it was treated as an outside power seeking to mediate.

“Everyone had agreed to follow the Minsk accords, including Kiev, Moscow, Western partners, and the uncontrolled territories in Donbass,” says Mykola Skorik, a Rada deputy with the minority Opposition Bloc, which voted against the bill. “This law contributes nothing to any conceivable peace process, but it creates huge obstacles for Minsk, as well as the US-Russia dialogue that has been going on. We didn’t need this law.”

Ukraine’s army has been transformed in the past four years from a rag-tag, underfunded post-Soviet rabble into one of Europe's strongest fighting forces. It had been receiving substantial NATO training and assistance even before the US decision to supply advanced weaponry.

But the Donbass rebels also reportedly have about 40,000 combat-hardened men under arms who, despite official denials, receive considerable support from Russia. Any attempt by Kiev to overrun the separatist regions would likely see the insertion of regular Russian forces to block it, as happened at least twice before – in the crucial fighting around Donetsk in the summer of 2014 and the battle of Debaltseve in early 2015 – leading to the defeat of Ukrainian forces.

“If Kiev attacks, Moscow would match the threat to whatever level that seemed necessary,” says Andrey Kortunov, director of Russian International Affairs Council, a think tank connected with the Russian Foreign Ministry. “Poroshenko prefers things as they are. No war, no peace. That allows him to capitalize on his role as a tough wartime leader, and defer any new peace initiatives until after the elections, if ever.”

Fatu Camara was in the middle of one of her live-streamed, midnight shows on Jan. 21, 2017 when she interrupted regular programming to break the news: Gambian strongman Yahya Jammeh was fleeing the country, after 23 years of repressive rule.

“I had thousands of people listening to the radio that night,” says Ms. Camara, a Gambian exile living in the United States. “We were all crying, it was so emotional. Jammeh was the only president we knew; we grew up when he came to power.”

For Camara and her listeners, some of the tens of thousands of Gambians who fled during Mr. Jammeh's repressive regime, it was a life-changing win – one they'd contributed to from afar. But even as they celebrated, many emigrants' thoughts turned to next steps: How could they help remake the country?

It was a particularly meaningful question for Camara, a broadcaster who founded Gambia’s first TV talk show and served two brief stints as Jammeh’s press secretary. In 2013, however, she was charged with sedition and detained for three weeks, accused of spreading “false news” to tarnish his image. After her release, she fled to Georgia. But having Gambia’s problems out of sight didn’t mean out of mind. Camara founded the Fatu Network, a site reporting news from home. And like many Gambians living abroad, she pushed to help real-estate developer Adama Barrow defeat Jammeh at the ballot box in December 2016 – and to mobilize the international community to enforce the people’s will, after one of Africa’s longest serving dictators refused to step down. 

But it was just the first step in making the Gambia they’d dreamed of returning to. One year later, the diaspora is carving out a new role, keen to contribute to prosperity and democracy in the country they fled. For some, that means continuing support from afar; for others, it means coming home at last.

“I want to actively participate in the rebuilding of The Gambia,” says Malanding Jaiteh, a scientist who made the move from New York last year. “I see my position and my abilities as an opportunity. I believe that what I can put in place here will last beyond my lifetime.”

Watching, working from afar

During Jammeh’s years of authoritarian rule and corruption, more than 100,000 of Gambia's 2 million citizens left the country, establishing communities from Seattle to Oslo.

One of them is Dr. Jaiteh, who came to the United States for a Ph.D. program in 1993, assuming he’d return home after graduation to continue his work in natural resource management. A year into his program, however, Jammeh came to power through a coup. Considering job offers in Gambia and the US, Jaiteh faced a tough decision – but thought back to his recent visit home, which coincided with the public chase and execution of a military officer accused of treason.

“People were fearful something else was going to happen next. You could feel that,” Jaiteh says. “That really said to me something is seriously wrong here.” He moved his family to New York and began working at Columbia University’s Earth Institute, investigating illegal sand mining and land acquisition in Gambia in his free time.

Jaiteh, who helped lead the Diaspora Election Command Center, and Camara are part of a loose but influential group of Gambians abroad who helped unite the fractured political opposition around Mr. Barrow, raising more than $100,000 for his campaign. Barrow, a first-time political candidate, went on to win the election by a 43.3 percent to 39.6 percent margin.

The diaspora leadership also worked with Vanguard Africa, a nonprofit that advocates for pro-democracy politicians. Jeffery Smith, the executive director of Vanguard Africa, helped Gambians in the US get meetings at the State Department and connect with international media. The diaspora was crucial in focusing attention on Gambia in the lead-up to the election, he says.

“Dictators grow strength in the shadows. They become more emboldened in the darkness and [the diaspora] were able to take that away from Jammeh,” he says. “The international spotlight was on the country. The people in the country recognized this; they were becoming more emboldened because of that.”

But it still came as a surprise when Jammeh lost the election and fled to Equatorial Guinea, after threats of regional military intervention. Not only did many Gambians abroad have new hope for reform – but returning home safely, period, seemed a possibility. In the waning years of his regime, after a failed coup attempt, Jammeh had treated the diaspora as a threat to his control, particularly journalists and activists who had fled the country.

Jaiteh returned for his first post-vote visit in March. Another visit in July convinced him to buy land and start building a house. He was moving back.

A new chapter begins

No definite count of returnees exists, according to Omar Kebbeh, an economist with the US Bureau of Economic Analysis. But not every Gambian who wants to contribute to the country’s future has a move in mind. An effort to keep engaging the diaspora has been spearheaded by the Migration and Sustainable Development in the Gambia project (MSDG), which is establishing policy recommendations to encourage them to invest in development at home: from creating government bonds targeting the diaspora, to co-development projects, to reducing the cost of remittances, to utilizing them in an informal ambassador system.

“Before the government invests so much money bringing consulars, they have lots of Gambians in the diaspora who are ambassadors already, officially and unofficially,” explains Ndey Jobarteh, a founder of MSDG’s “Gambia House” center for engagement in Oslo. Last year the center helped arrange a visit of potential Norwegian investors to Gambia, and has recently started offering informal consular services to Gambians in Scandinavia.

Remittances already contribute 22 percent of Gambia’s total GDP, according to Mr. Kebbeh. And the diaspora is contributing to the housing market as people return to establish private businesses. “There is openness in the new government … there is now competition,” he says. Last December, MSDG took advantage of many Gambians’ family visits to host a series of meetings seeking advice and pitching their ideas – a “diaspora month” they plan to have each year.

“My administration recognizes the Gambian Diaspora as the eighth region of The Gambia,” Barrow said in January, as he launched more diaspora-engagement initiatives.

Not everyone welcomes their help. Multiple people who spoke to the Monitor referenced a compilation of returnee resumes sent to the new government by diaspora leaders, seemingly ignored by officials, and alleged that prejudice was at play. Nor are all returnees satisfied with the new administration’s first year.

“The Gambian diaspora live in countries that exemplify successful democratic governance,” says Abdoul Salaam Secka, the technical director of MSDG. “Standards in public service are high. So naturally this is something they want to see replicated in The Gambia. But almost by default, where The Gambia is starting from, from a very low place, and it’s just natural that the pace of progress will be slow, so that creates a degree of anxiety between government and diasporans.”

Going home isn’t easy – particularly for businesses like Camara’s. “Living in the West we’re used to 24 hours of electricity, and then you go back to Gambia and it’s 20 hours of blackout,” she explains. But she’s committed to returning to invest her skills at home.

“No matter how America or the West is, home is where the heart is,” she says. “We want to be in our country where we eat our food, where we go see our grandparents every day, where we greet our family members. That’s what we want to do.”

Marvin used to have a job. A real job. The kind that came with health insurance and paid days off and lunch breaks. He earned about $250 a week – a small fortune in South Africa, where more than 50 percent of the population lives on less than $80 per person per month and two-thirds of young people are unemployed.

But when his contract with a Johannesburg logistics company ended last year, he couldn’t find anything to replace it – until a friend told him about the ride-sharing app Uber.

“It seemed like the easiest thing for me. You don’t need a degree, you don’t need a CV, you just sign up and go,” he says.

Stop there, and Marvin is practically the application’s poster-child, creating a job for himself in an economy that seemed determined to lock him out.

But there is a crucial difference between Marvin and most Uber drivers in the West.

He doesn’t own a car, or have any means to buy one.

Instead, like many of the app’s drivers across the developing world, he pays to drive someone else’s – and occasionally ends the week owing the car’s owner money. (Marvin asked that his full name not be used, because the car’s owner didn’t authorize him to speak.) In a month, he says, he usually clears about $300. “With Uber, I live hand-to-mouth.”

It’s far from the be-your-own-boss image extolled by fans of the so-called sharing economy (or the related “gig economy”), in which anything from rides across town to handyman chores can be arranged peer-to-peer via big-data apps: cutting out middlemen, expenses, and much of a “traditional” job.

Critics have voiced doubts about the benefits of such an “Uberized” world from the beginning. But the company’s rapid rise in parts of Africa, Latin America, and Asia has given rise to particularly urgent questions about whether the phenomenon can flourish in highly unequal societies with low formal employment – and who it actually serves there.

“Uber has made this ‘empowerment, freedom, and flexible hours’ narrative a key part of its appeal,” says Juvaria Jafri, a doctoral researcher at City University of London who has studied the rise of these taxi-like “Uber businesses” in Pakistan. “But the whole narrative of uplifting and empowering gets very dented when you look at the vulnerability of some of the people it’s actually looking to empower and uplift.”

Car: optional

Marvin’s set-up looks, in many ways, very similar to the cab companies of old – with drivers forking over a cut of their earnings to a wealthier middleman – exactly what Uber has always said it is not. (“Uber is not a taxi nor is it a taxi or transportation company. We are not Uber Cab or Uber Taxi,” wrote Uber South Africa in an email to the Monitor.)

That arrangement might not be appealing to many drivers in the United States or Europe, but in countries where formal employment levels are low, it has particularly strong “better-than-nothing” appeal. (In South Africa, for instance, formal unemployment hovers above 25 percent.)

“This isn’t a career, but it’s a way to make money to live,” says Ignacio, a Mexican Uber driver who says that at his age – 61 – it would be nearly impossible to find a formal job.

The quiet creep of professional middlemen into the sharing economy is nothing new. Accommodation website Airbnb, for instance, has been widely criticized for becoming in many parts of the world little more than a professional apartment-renting service.

“In reality, this isn’t the sharing economy anymore,” says Carlos, a Mexican transport economist and owner of three Uber cars, which he hires out to drivers in Mexico City. (He asked that his real name not be used because he occasionally writes about Uber.) “I’m not sharing my good  with someone else when I’m not using it. I’m participating in a taxi service associated with an app. That’s it.”

Middlemen and women allow Uber drivers across the developing world to bypass their single biggest hurdle to driving for the company – getting a car. In the US, more than 90 percent of American households own a car, according to census data, and many of them would like to turn a bit of profit from that investment. But in countries like Mexico, most people simply don’t have the necessary income or access to credit for car ownership. Nearly 60 percent of Mexican adults, for instance, don’t even have a bank account, according to a 2016 report.

In some countries, including South Africa, Uber has set up special arrangements with banks to help drivers buy a car. But many complain the terms of the loans are extortionate, while many others say they still aren’t eligible.

“Often I wish my guys could own their own cars – for their sake,” says Mike Dirkett, who owns and rents 18 Ubers in South Africa. “But to get that finance you need to show history of a proper job and consistent pay slips, and most of them just don’t have that, so we work together.” In his case, he charges his drivers about $230 per week. Anything over that is theirs to keep, and he estimates that most of his drivers make between $100 and $200 a week. Meanwhile, “I’m making money in my sleep,” he says.

Sustainable system?

That doesn’t just happen behind Uber’s back. Indeed, in many countries – including South Africa and Mexico – the company’s app even includes a feature connecting would-be drivers to owners looking to rent out their vehicles.

But it also means profit margins can be excessively slim for drivers, who often earn only a fraction of each ride. And Uber rides cost much less outside of the US and Europe, further driving down earnings. In Boston, for instance, a 2.5 mile Uber ride would cost about $10. In Johannesburg, a trip of the same distance would be around $4, and in Mexico City $2.50.

“Prices are designed to encourage more riders on the road, to help increase trips for drivers, but equally, you want to make sure the basic economics of drivers are sustainable,” Uber South Africa wrote in a statement. “We’re committed to making Uber the most affordable option to move around and our experience shows us we can make that happen while making Uber the best possible platform for driver-partners to earn a living.”

(Uber Mexico did not respond to multiple interview requests for this story, made in person, via email, and on Twitter).

But many Uber drivers in both Africa and Latin America have taken issue with Uber’s low prices in the region. In Nigeria, for instance, drivers deserted the app en masse for an Estonian competitor, Taxify, after Uber slashed prices 40 percent last May. And last year a group of South African Uber drivers took their case to a labor tribunal – arguing that they should be considered Uber’s employees, and thus be entitled to workers’ legal protections. (They won the initial case, but this week the decision was overturned.)

Indeed, no drivers interviewed for this story wanted to give their full name out of concern for their job security. Hector, a Mexico City Uber driver in an electric-green hatch-back, says he feels like the owner of the car he drives is taking advantage of him. He has to pay a set amount of about $130 to the owner once a week, which sometimes means driving 12-hour-or-more shifts each day in order to have any income left over for himself.

“The car is his, but sometimes I feel like he thinks that I belong to him, too,” he says.

Uber itself also seems to question whether its rapid global expansion is really working. Last week, after the Japanese tech company SoftBank announced that it had become the company’s largest shareholder, its board director Rajeev Misra told the Financial Times he hoped the company would double-down on its core markets in the US, Europe, Latin America, and Australia. (Mr. Misra is expected to join Uber’s board).

“The idea of Uber initially was that you drive your own car. I have the sense that the model just doesn’t work if you try to bring in third parties,” says Austine Gasnier, who used to hire a driver in Mexico City to operate her second car as an Uber when it wasn’t being used by her family. But after a few months, a robbery, and many headaches with the process, she dropped out.

“We realized that it wasn’t profitable for him [the driver] or for us. Only Uber won.”

Story Hinckley/The Christian Science Monitor

Los Angeles Valley College President Erika Endrijonas knows many students at her school struggle with homelessness, but she says individual schools can only do so much to help without state-funded housing.

After living in her truck for three months with her teenage daughter and dog Snoopy, Alix Silverman decided it was time to go to college.

She had always worked minimum wage jobs to make rent, but she found herself homeless after getting injured on the job. So when the city of Los Angeles approved her for Section 8 housing, Ms. Silverman, who has a GED, knew she had to take advantage of her new federally subsidized rent and enrolled in the community college down the street.

“I always wanted to go to college but I never had money for anything else [besides rent]...,” says the forty-something Ms. Silverman. “I was like: This is my opportunity.”

Silverman plans to graduate from Los Angeles Valley College (LAVC) next year with an associate’s degree in art history. She hopes to transfer to a four-year college – ideally UCLA – to earn her bachelor’s degree so she can find a job in art history research.

“I’m not even an artist, I just love to work around art and the history of people and cultures,” says Silverman. She looks down at her spiral notebook, and when she looks up, she is crying. “I get emotional, I’m sorry. I just finally found something that I am so interested in and fascinated by.”

Story Hinckley/The Christian Science Monitor

Ellie Rabani (l.), director of Los Angeles Valley College's CalWORKs program, and Emily Mutanda, director of the Helping Hands Project, lead efforts on campus to fight food and housing insecurity among community college students. Helping Hands plans to build a pantry-cafe on campus to replace the filing cabinet system in their staff kitchen.

Community colleges like LAVC have traditionally been a popular and effective route for lifting Americans like Silverman out of poverty. But the lack of affordable housing across the country is preventing or delaying students from obtaining the degrees and certificates that they need to improve their future. 

Among community college students nationwide, two in three students are food insecure (meaning they often go hungry), half are housing insecure (meaning they often can't pay their full rent or utility bills), and almost 14 percent are homeless, according to a 2016 survey by the Wisconsin HOPE Lab in Madison. And in California, the state with the greatest homelessness problem, housing crises among students enrolled in Los Angeles Community College District’s nine colleges are the norm: almost one in five indicated they had experienced homelessness in the past year, based on a 2016 survey. 

Community colleges may only get funded to instruct students, but education leaders in Los Angeles say that their moral and ethical duties go beyond the classroom. And while there are no present state or federal plans to fund housing on community college campuses, faculty, staff, and students in and around Los Angeles are piecing together their own solutions.

“It’s not just about getting an ‘A’ or a ‘B,’ ” says Ellie Rabani, director of LAVC’s CalWORKs program and one of the faculty members who first called attention to the problem of homelessness on campus. “If you are hungry, you can't study. If you don't have a place to sleep, you can’t study. If we want them to transfer and become whoever they want, we have to provide these things to them.”

In 2016, 5.9 million Americans were enrolled in public, two-year colleges. Employment projections suggest these students are a smart investment: by 2026, employment opportunities for US workers with an associate or bachelor’s degree will grow by at least 10 percent, whereas growth for workers with a high school diploma is projected to be half of that.

“We hear a lot of press, academics, and politicians talk about how we need a higher skilled workforce,” says Jed Richardson, acting director of the Wisconsin HOPE Lab, which focuses on economic barriers to postsecondary education. “The only way to increase the skill of the workforce is to increase the skills of the exact students we are talking about: nontraditional students who come from low-income families.”

'It was so embarrassing.'

The first office in LAVC’s new administration building is for CalWORKs, the public welfare program for parents. On the outside the office’s glass windows are posters advertising various programs (“Need $ for food? Apply for CalFresh!”) and on the inside are rows of smiling women in cubicles, a basket of apples for visitors to grab on their way out, and a corner of kid toys.

Symbolic of the way that LAVC pushes the bounds of state-funded resources, the CalWORKs office has become something bigger: the epicenter for the Helping Hands Project, which aims to be “a temporary bridge” that allows homeless students to finish their educational plans by providing them with various resources. What began as a group of faculty and staff collecting money for a homeless mother on campus five years ago has become a program that helped 45 students in the last six months, many of them with stories like Silverman's and that of Steven Fuel, who recently found himself homeless with only one semester left of school.

Story Hinckley/The Christian Science Monitor

Steven Fuel, who plans to graduate from Los Angeles Valley College this spring with a certificate in radio broadcasting, has struggled with homelessness. He received support from the campus Helping Hands Project, which didn’t find him housing, but did ease his financial situation in almost every other way so he could save up money and move into a friend’s apartment, and soon thereafter, his own apartment near school.

“I didn't want anybody to know because it was so embarrassing. You feel like you have everything you want and then it’s totally taken away from you,” says Mr. Fuel. “But I just thought: I can’t quit. I’m so close.”

Fuel says he only regrets not asking his school for help sooner. Helping Hands didn’t find him housing, but it eased his financial situation in almost every other way so he could save up money and move into a friend’s apartment, and soon thereafter, his own apartment near school.

“I’m not saying we do everything [for students], because housing is a big thing. But we have access to make their lives a little bit easier,” says Ms. Rabani. “Students can say, ‘I deal with my problems at 9:00 pm. But when I come to Valley College, I don’t have a problem. I have food, friends, mentors, and instructors.’ ”

A kitchen intended for CalWORKS and Helping Hands staff has become a makeshift food pantry, with cans of green beans and soup filling filing cabinets. Down the hallway from the office, Helping Hands has taken over a storage room with shelves of toiletries, bed sheets, clothes, shoes, and towels, many of the supplies donated by the school’s faculty and staff.

To help with transportation costs to and from campus, Helping Hands offers monthly gas reimbursements of $60 or half-off bus cards. Students can borrow textbooks from Helping Hands free of charge, and return them at the end of the semester for other students to use. Free tutoring is offered in a classroom attached to the CalWorks office. Every morning, school staff picks up leftover breakfast food from the nearby elementary school and every Sunday they pick up leftover produce from the nearby Studio City farmers’ market.

Even though Silverman has housing, she says these resources have been crucial to making sure she stays enrolled full time at LAVC. It is hard to financially recover from a stint of homelessness, she explains, and her family often runs short on grocery money.

“I don’t think there is that line where we say, ‘Okay, we don’t help with that,’ because the alternative will be that we won’t have students,” says Emily Mutanda, who was hired in July to lead Helping Hands. 

SOURCE:

Los Angeles Community College District 'Survey on Food & Housing Insecurity,' Fall 2016

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Karen Norris/Staff

Fuel is on track to graduate with a certificate in broadcasting this spring and he hopes to have his own radio show someday.

“It never came to my mind that my school could help me in the ways that Helping Hands has helped me,” he says. “Without their help the last couple of months, I would not have made it through.”

A student-run shelter

Across the city from LAVC, the Students4Students shelter has a unique approach to tackling student homelessness in nearby Santa Monica.

The first of its kind in the country, the Students4Students shelter is run by college students, for college students. The shelter itself was also the idea of a student, UCLA engineering graduate student Louis Tse, after he noticed students sleeping on campus.

Students4Students, formerly called the Bruin Shelter, is funded entirely by crowdfunding. Opened at the beginning of the 2016-2017 school year in the back room of a nearby Lutheran church, it has eight beds and offers students six months of free housing and a family-style breakfast and dinner every day. 

Story Hinckley/The Christian Science Monitor

The Students4Students shelter in Santa Monica, Calif., is run by UCLA students for homeless students in the area. The shelter houses six students at a time in the spare room of a nearby church.

“It was a completely humbling revelation,” Rebecca Sarvady, a UCLA senior who volunteers at the shelter, says about learning so many of her peers had housing troubles. "We spend so much time as students worrying about classes, clubs, and maybe tuition, but the concept of being housing insecure feels like a whole different ballpark." 

Perhaps the most encouraging component of the shelter is the large team who runs it. Ms. Sarvady and 72 of her UCLA peers manage everything from preparing dinners from the group’s laminated binder of recipes, to advertising the facility and supervising the shelter at night. The UCLA volunteers sign confidentiality agreements and students who interview the shelter applicants go through social work training.

Any college student is welcome to apply, but as the two college pennants in the shelter’s hangout room suggest, the majority of the 23 students that the shelter helped last year were enrolled in either Santa Monica College (SMC), a community college, or UCLA. 

At SMC, student homelessness is so prevalent that faculty and staff sometimes offer to house students themselves, says Nancy Grass, associate dean of student life, who currently has a homeless student living with her. 

“The Students4Students shelter has been a fantastic idea. We are so grateful they have offered us beds. But we are dealing with hundreds [of homeless students], so having four beds...,” Dr. Grass says, trailing off. “It’s a great step forward, but it’s a little one.”

Looking ahead

In the fall of 2016, California Gov. Jerry Brown approved two laws to help struggling college students: community colleges must allow shower times for homeless students as well as improve food access by expanding CalFresh (or foodstamp) benefits on campus and allocating funding to on-campus food pantries.

California has also tried to keep tuition low. A full-time community college student in California will pay roughly $1,450 per school year, less than half the national average.

But until the state puts serious funding specifically towards housing, or relaxes zoning laws for building on state-funded campuses, say educators, the situation can only improve so much. Community college enrollment is dropping across the state, says LAVC President Erika Endrijonas, and the high cost of living for students is definitely a factor.

In the meantime, LAVC will continue to look for creative solutions to help students. Helping Hands plans to build a pantry-cafe on campus to replace the filing cabinet system, and Endrijonas is working with a team of University of Southern California architects and local nonprofits to research the possibility of building small moveable apartment pods.

“We know it’s a problem, we are doing everything we can, and whenever there is a roadblock, we try to address it,” says Dr. Endrijonas. “But in the end, they fund me to instruct people, not to help them [with housing]... and that’s where the rub is.”

AP Photo

Nigeria's President Muhammadu Buhari, left, laughs with Gabon's President Ali Bongo Ondimba, at the African Union summit in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, Jan. 28.

Africa’s leaders ended a summit Jan. 29 with a new statistic on their thoughts: By 2063, the continent will see a tripling of the number of working-age people, to nearly 2 billion. The increase will far surpass the increase in all of Asia, India, and China. To create jobs for Africa’s coming population bulge, the leaders decided to focus their efforts this year on the one big obstacle to economic growth: corruption.

Each year Africa loses about a quarter of its gross domestic product to corruption, either in petty bribes or wholesale looting of natural resources. This injustice, says Vera Songwe, head of the Economic Commission for Africa, “is more powerful than any other injustice we as Africans could face.” The best evidence of the problem is the fact that an estimated 200,000 Africans are currently attempting to cross the Mediterranean to reach Europe.

To tackle the issue, the 55-nation African Union named Nigeria’s president, Muhammadu Buhari, the AU’s first anti-corruption crusader. Mr. Buhari told the summit he will primarily enlist young people in a grass-roots campaign that demands transparency and accountability in government.

“To win the fight against corruption,” he said, “we must have a change of mind-set.” Reforms in governance alone, such as better watchdog agencies or independent judges, are not enough.

Buhari was selected because he seems to be one of Africa’s more sincere anti-corruption leaders. Elected in 2015, he has begun to bring some integrity into Nigeria’s institutions. He has far to go. Other leaders say a bottom-up approach is needed.

One effort is a new activist group, the People’s Grassroots Association for Corruption-Free Nigeria, which was launched in January. It plans to encourage people to see themselves as agents of change. Or as Thuli Madonsela, South Africa’s former lead public prosecutor puts it, the public must understand and be players in public accountability.

A recent survey by London-based Chatham House and the University of Pennsylvania found that Nigerians frequently underestimate the extent to which fellow citizens believe corruption to be wrong. It is not enough to simply change individual beliefs. If people were made more aware of how commonly held their moral beliefs are, “they would be more motivated to act collectively against corruption,” the report stated.

“Social norms drive the solicitation of bribes by law enforcement officials, whereas the giving of bribes is influenced more by circumstances and by people’s beliefs about what other people are doing,” the report said.

The current lack of confidence in official institutions has weakened Nigeria’s national identity, which should be based on the universal application of a fair and neutral rule of law. Instead, states the report, “less effective social contracts are forged particularly around ethnic or religious identities – an arrangement that fuels inter-communal distrust.”

Any government-led campaign against corruption, it concluded, will only be perceived as sincere if it is “self-examining and self-correcting.” Nigeria may have started down that road. Now the rest of Africa, at least by the signals from the latest AU summit, plans to get on that bandwagon.