2025 Outstanding Faculty Service
California State University, Long Beach
Professor, School of Social Work
Executive Director, The Center for Equitable Higher Education
My research on student food and housing security is driven by my passion for service, and I work diligently to develop vehicles for students, faculty, and administrators toward student success. Ultimately, I am motivated by a focus on equity and serving our most marginalized students."
Dr. Rashida Crutchfield, a professor in the School of Social Work at Cal State Long Beach, is credited with significantly changing universities’ understanding of how housing and food insecurity create barriers to students’ success.
Crutchfield is a founding advisor of CSULB’s Basic Needs Program, a critical campus resource for students to gain access to food, housing, grants and other essential needs. She first began studying impacts on students experiencing basic need insecurity across the CSU in 2015. Crutchfield’s research, along with the research of a small community of colleagues, essentially forged a basic needs movement in policy and practice across the country. In 2016, the CSU Chancellor’s Office provided funds for Crutchfield to develop and implement—through collaborative leadership—the first CSU basic needs conference for CSU staff, faculty, administrators, students and educational and community partners to learn about and develop promising practices for college students lacking basic needs.
In 2018, along with two other CSU colleagues, Crutchfield co-created the CSU Basic Needs Research Consortium (BNRC), which continues to regularly convene experts from across the system. She was also part of a team that developed the California Higher Education Basic Needs Alliance, a group that includes all three segments of California public higher education working together to support progress in basic needs policy, practice and research.
In spring 2021, Crutchfield founded the CSULB Center for Equitable Higher Education, a research center that aims to amplify student voices and support practitioners, policy makers and other decision makers in promoting equitable higher education.
At CSULB, Crutchfield also serves on the President’s Equity and Change Commission, participated in the Dean’s Black Health Equity Group, and has led the College of Health and Human Services and Long Beach community task force to address homelessness. As the campus’s primary contact for research regarding students experiencing homelessness and food insecurity, she has participated in dozens of interviews for print media, radio and television.
Crutchfield’s many recognitions include receiving the 2018 Faculty of the Year award from the Cal State Student Association and the 2024 Humanitarian of the Year Award from the California Conference for Equality and Justice.
Crutchfield earned her bachelor’s degree in occupational studies and a doctoral degree in educational leadership from CSULB. She has a master’s degree in social work from Washington University.