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Tidewater Community College has served South Hampton Roads — both students and employers — for 50 years. It has grown from 1 campus into a regional educational and economic force.
Their mission is to provide collegiate education and workforce training to individuals of all ages, helping them achieve their goals and contribute to the vitality of the regional and global community.
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When COVID-19 emerged in early 2020, Tidewater Community College (TCC) was already in the midst of reimagining its student support services. The college had begun expanding its scope of support, but the pandemic brought a new level of urgency. The crisis highlighted the urgent need to address basic needs and student security more proactively, ensuring students received the essential support they required. TCC needed a proactive, structured, data-informed, and holistic support system.
Prior to 2020, TCC’s support services were largely reactive and transactional. Students would present their immediate needs—books, reliable transportation, emergency housing—and staff would respond as best they could. There was little proactive outreach or holistic case management, and most of the college’s resource directories existed in paper binders across the four campuses.
The pandemic changed everything. It quickly became apparent that large numbers of students were facing overlapping, systemic barriers: housing insecurity, food scarcity, transportation challenges, childcare gaps, and more. TCC needed a new system—and fast.
TCC President, Dr. Marcia Conston, already familiar with Single Stop from her previous role at Central Piedmont Community College, championed its early adoption.
The Student Resource and Empowerment Center (SREC) was created as a fully integrated, student-facing initiative to ensure basic needs support across the student population. Single Stop provided a structure to help shape the program as it was being built. Through a combination of digital infrastructure, campus integration, and compassionate case management, TCC has now built a model that has become a beacon for how to do student support right.
With support from Single Stop, SREC digitized its community resource data, restructured student intake, and embedded support services directly into campus life. What was once a system of disconnected paper binders became a centralized, digital hub—just in time to support an entirely remote student and faculty population.
Today, access to support is a visible, normalized part of campus life at TCC.
Each of TCC’s four campuses hosts an SREC located in the student union, placing basic needs resources in the heart of student activity. Case managers are consistently present at events, outreach is ongoing, and a newly hired Associate Director focuses exclusively on community building, ensuring every student knows about SREC and Single Stop.
TCC has moved beyond providing emergency aid. It has made a promise: any student who chooses to enroll can count on the college to help them navigate life’s fundamental challenges.
“If you're going to take the leap to go to school or return to school, we will be there for you,” Dr. Natali explains. “We can assure them that we are going to have the resources to get them through.”
Tidewater Community College has demonstrated that the difference between a stagnant support system and a transformative one isn’t just technology—it’s about vision, leadership, and intentional design. By adopting Single Stop as both an infrastructure and ethos, TCC has created a system where students are no longer just getting by—they’re being empowered to thrive and focus on what truly matters: their education.
