For Darryl Toney, a Fresno State film and media arts major, housing insecurity is nothing new.
And going to college wasn’t exactly a part of his original plan.
Toney grew up in Visalia with a single mother struggling with addiction. When he reached sixth grade and family tensions with his grandmother grew, Toney said it all became too much for everyone.
That’s where he said the cycle of being unhoused began.
“I lived with my cousins, I kind of bounced around,” Toney said. “My mom definitely had it worse, but it was kind of hard seeing her, and I didn’t want to be around her as much as possible.”
However, once Toney got connected with the Center for Essential Needs (CEN) at Fresno State, attending college became possible. Through the CEN, students can receive housing, emergency grants and general support for resource insecurity.
Within the last few months, the CEN has faced a budget scare. Diana Karageozian, a clinical case manager at the CEN, said one of the center’s two grants saw a major cut — nearly $560,000. This left the center having to turn students away and tighten up its spending.
But as The Collegian was in the process of reporting this story and asking the university questions about funding, Karageozian said the center received more support.
“We received a new $200,000 allocation after you began working on your article,” Karageozian said.
In fact, she said the CEN received the money the same day that The Collegian sent its inquiry.
Through this bumpy funding pattern, it isn’t just Toney who relies on the CEN. For the 2025-26 academic school year, 177 students have received direct financial and housing support so far, and the center estimates that they will have served about 350 students by the end of the semester facing housing instability.
Across the California State University system, about 14,000 students received housing support, and 5,037 received emergency funding in 2021-22, according to a housing insecurity report.
It goes both ways
For Fresno State, supplying hundreds of students with these necessities isn’t cheap, which is why the CEN relies on certain grants for funding. When Karageozian saw that one of the center’s two vital grants, the Basic Needs Initiative, got significantly cut, she knew the CEN was going to have to make some alterations for the time being.
In 2024, the CEN received about $600,000 for this grant from the Division of Academic Affairs. For 2025-26, the CEN originally received a scarce $45,000 from that fund.
The Basic Needs Initiative helps to cover all expenses unrelated to housing, which makes up a significant amount of what the center does.
“We’ve just had to say no to a lot more students,” Karageozian said, before the center received the recent $200,000 allocation. “It makes us have to look at each student’s situation more closely. That takes time. That means a lot of back and forth with students if they can’t accept that there’s not going to be any help.”
In 2025-26, the CEN received about $395,000 from the Instructurally Related Activities (IRA) program, but Karageozian said that the center is somewhat limited in how these funds can be spent.
She said IRA fees can be used on items like meal plans, graduation applications, parking permits, bills related to the Student Health and Counseling Center, school supplies, textbooks, laptops and laundry money for dorm students.
Back in October, Karageozian went to an Associated Students, Inc. meeting and voiced her concerns about funding. Still, in 2026, she isn’t completely sure why the CEN was only allocated a fraction of what they were anticipating, even with the university’s latter allotment.
Prior to the news about the increased allotment, The Collegian reached out to Phong Yang, vice president for student affairs and enrollment management, regarding the center’s funding disparity.
The Collegian asked Yang why the CEN did not receive its full, anticipated allocation, and where the rest of the money went.
It was after being asked if the CEN will receive supplemental funding to make up for the gap in the Basic Needs Initiative that Yang said the center is getting the additional $200,000, bringing its total budget to $1.2 million.
Yang did not provide an answer to why the money was not initially provided, why it is still not the full amount and where the rest of the funding went.
Living in uncertainty
For some students, their personal well-being is the least of their worries. Timothy Stonebarger, a plant science major, has a wife and three young children that he must also provide for.
A Bakersfield commuter, Stonebarger has used the CEN emergency grant and other direct funding assistance to help him pay for rent, gas and food. When his family’s financial situation worsened in 2024, Stonebarger said he didn’t have anywhere to live for about a month.
“I really was considering actually quitting college that semester,” Stonebarger said. “I was talking to my wife, and I was like, ‘So we either get this emergency grant from [the CEN], or I’m just going to have to go work.’”
He said that, without the CEN, attending Fresno State wouldn’t be possible.
Education major Katrina Sanchez-Carlock has also had her fair share of funding insecurity.
After losing her job in December 2024, she said she was barely scraping by just to have somewhere to live.
When financial aid no longer covered her, she had to find other methods by which to survive.
“I just found myself in this spot, you know?” Sanchez-Carlock said. “And so that’s what kind of led me to essential needs.”
The CEN aided Sanchez-Carlock in paying bills, housing money and other necessities. She said that once she reached out, the CEN got back to her in just one or two days.
“They gave me a little bit of relief of worry and stress,” Sanchez-Carlock said. “At one point, I hadn’t even got food stamps yet, so I was just like, what do I do? And they really just put me at ease.”
As for the future, things are starting to look up for Toney. His mom is about 130 days clean, and he’s on the hunt for an apartment once his CEN-provided scholarship runs out, which currently allows him to live in the dorms.
“I thank her [Karageozian] every day,” Toney said. “I’m actually meeting with her on Friday to talk about potential landing spots for housing next semester.”
The CEN is located in the Family, Food and Sciences building Room 110.
