Student organization Knights Needs launches to support student basic needs

Recently launched student organization Knights Needs promises to advocate for students facing food, housing, or financial insecurity. 

Knights Needs was created this semester by six students in the Think and Do Tank in the Eagleton Democracy Lab. According to Knights Needs, one in three Rutgers students are food insecure, and one in four undergrad students face housing insecurity.

Organization leader Olen Taylor discussed his teams goals as the organization launches.

“We are prioritizing expanding our base, and to give people a next step. It’s also an opportunity to identify leaders who are the people that are angry about the current living conditions on campus, and want to do something about it.”

Taylor said his team decided to evolve the group into a student organization after finding the fight for student basic needs support would be a much bigger project than they could do in one semester.

“I proposed to everyone that we form an organizaiotn, because with an organization you have the opportunity to recruit students facing these issues,” Taylor said. “That way, our solutions are more grounded in the lived experience of students facing housing, food, financial insecurity, and we can also develop them as organizers so that pressure can be sustained long-term.”

Taylor said the group works closely alongside faculty members and administration groups, including with the Student Basic Needs Center.

Taylor said his team chose to help address student basic need inequality, in part, because he and other members of the Knights Needs team have faced it themselves.

Taylor said he personally grew up watching his mother struggle financially, and was inspired to use his time at Rutgers to help people in the same situation. 

“I watched her work three jobs. Bussing tables, substitute teaching, cleaning hotel rooms. She was the hardest worker I knew, and yet I saw the world kind of fail her, over and over again.”

Olen also described his own struggles paying out-of-state tuition and trying to be an active community organizer on campus while commuting. Knights Needs is just one student activist group Olen helps run, with others including Move4More, a disability fitness group he helped found , and RU for Disability Justice, an equal access activist group.

Olen described sleeping in friends’ closets so he can contribute to his community at night, while making his early classes in the morning.

“I’m a very involved person in the community,” Taylor said. “[I’m] taking 18 credits a semester, giving pretty much all my free time to my community organizing projects. Living on campus would make that way easier.”

Taylor said his personal experiences help him engage with his peers facing similar struggles, and drives him to make change on campus.

“It makes me angry,” Taylor said. “We need more students who are also angry about that and want to channel that anger somewhere productive.”

According to Taylor, Knights Needs plans to spend its first few months as an organization reaching out to the community to learn what students need and finding where they can be most useful.

“Good organizers understand that you have to build power, you have to win things, you have to earn the respect of your decision-makers to make stuff like that happen,” Taylor said. “We’re in the midst right now of identifying what is an issue that is felt broadly and deeply by students who are not getting their basic needs met [and] that we can win on immediately.”

Knights Needs will have its first meeting on April 30 at 7 p.m. in Alexander Library, and invites anyone who has struggled with basic needs to attend and share their story, as well as anyone looking to help their cause.