As a full-time student while working more than 40 hours a week for nearly two years, Matthew Bodo also lived out of in his car — constantly in fear of being ticketed, burglarized or harassed.

“It was incredibly hectic,” Bodo, 21, a Foothill Community College student, said in an interview Friday. “But I saw education as the only way to survive.”

On Friday, Bodo organized a summit on student homelessness that drew more than 50 students, faculty, community members and elected officials. The group spent nearly four hours hearing from a panel of current and formerly homeless students and discussing possible remedies to the crisis that has left thousands of students in the Bay Area without a place to call home.

Bodo, 21, said the stigma around homelessness discouraged him from speaking up and seeking out additional resources for a long time.

“I refused to call myself homeless,” he said. “I had a car, and I thought that was a home.”

Bodo and the other student panelists Friday emphasized that expanding the definition of homeless students to those who are generally without stable housing — those who sleep in cars, couch surf or move from one friend’s house to the next but might not consider themselves homeless — will let such students know that they can and should seek out resources as well.

Daisy, 28, a student at Foothill College, said she never imagined identifying as a homeless student and living in an RV until she was forced to make the difficult decision in order to afford to stay in school.

Daisy, who is also an advocate for the Mountain View Vehicle Residents, said community members and politicians often do not understand that there’s a broad spectrum of homelessness.

“(Destigmatizing homelessness) is not just how you react to people, that’s how you react when someone proposes that we lower the restrictions on vehicle residents. That’s how you react when you go to the polling station,” Daisy said.

About a month ago Daisy entered active duty with the U.S. military and is now looking to transfer to either Williams or Dartmouth colleges.

After two hours of break-out sessions, participants ranked what they felt were the top short and long term solutions, including providing students with a 24-hour study area seven days a week, with lighting and heat, a day center with showers and laundry services and a lot for overnight parking.

Other suggestions included creating a homeless liaison on campus and an app that would connect students with available resources such as food pantries, shelters and financial aid opportunities; providing training for faculty members outlining how to approach homeless students; and advertising services on the syllabus of all classes.

Students at Foothill College are not the only ones struggling to find sustainable housing in the midst of the Bay Area’s growing crisis.

According to several recent surveys, one in five — or about 400,000 — California community college students has experienced homelessness within the last year. And thousands more are at risk of becoming homeless.

More than 4,000 students at San Jose State — approximately 13 percent of those enrolled — have found themselves homeless in the last year, according to a report from California State University.

Foothill College President Thuy Thi Nguyen said during the summit that successfully serving homeless students is going to take a “systemic and institutional mind shift” on everyone’s part.

“We can no longer make the assumption that students come to us already with housing,” Nguyen said.

Assemblyman Marc Berman, D-Palo Alto, who represents northern Santa Clara County and southern San Mateo County, was at the summit Friday listening to students and educating them about a bill he sponsored earlier this year.

“We heard it today in the human faces and stories and experiences, and we need to do more to try and help out these students and the other 400,000 community college students in California who experience some period of homelessness.”

Assembly bill 302, sponsored by Berman, would require that community colleges allow homeless students to sleep overnight inside their vehicles in campus parking lots.

The bill, which is now the Senate’s Education Committee, requires colleges to provide students in good standing with overnight access to campus parking lots by July 1, 2020 and connect them with available resources, such as food pantries. The schools would maintain the ability to set rules, like banning alcohol and drugs and choosing their hours of operation.

“I know that this bill is asking community colleges to do more than they ever have had to in the past…but we’re kind of at a situation in society where we all have to do more than we’ve ever done before,” Berman said.

After two years, Bodo finally opened up to faculty at Foothills about his lack of housing. A combination of financial aid, a higher paying job and an apartment that didn’t require him to prove his income was three times higher than the monthly rent, allowed him to finally secure a room in a house about seven months ago.

This summer, Bodo will be transferring to the University of California Los Angeles. A decision, he said, that was made easier by the fact that transfer students at UCLA are guaranteed housing during their first year.

However, Bodo said he understands that not all homeless students have been as lucky as he has and he saw Friday’s summit as his way to make an impact for those students before leaving campus.

“It seemed like a lot of other students, once they found out where they were going, kind of gave up,” Bodo said.” But there are so many homeless students here, and so many that are close to me, that I can’t stand to see them continue to live like this.”