Stories of Hunger

Sandra

Sandra is an “on and off” student because she doesn’t have student loans to help her pay for school, and she doesn’t want to accrue debt, so she works as much as she can to save to pay for school and living expenses – “I spend time working along the way so I don’t take on loans or debt.”

Her original plan/goal was to get certification in fashion merchandising, which is typically six or so classes.   Sandra would take one class at a time while working.  However, when her younger sister was diagnosed with acute promyelocytic leukemia just as she was about to enroll in a new semester of school, she figured she was going to put school on hold.  Even Before her sister’s diagnosis, the family sometimes struggled to pay for all their necessities, including food. “There are times,” Sandra says, “when we’re like…do you want dinner? I mean we can just watch a movie.” Her sister being in the hospital put a lot of extra stress on Sandra’s family, they struggled to find a balance between working enough to pay their regular bills as well as hospital bills. But Sandra was able to get assistance from Houston Food Bank’s Food Scholarship program and therefore was able to enroll for the new semester.  “And I am now able to go for an actual degree rather than just a certification,” says Sandra.  “With my sister getting sick, I was going to have to help my family more with expenses which meant I would have less money to use for school enrollment.  But, with the assistance, not having the extra strains on finances helped me to be able to focus more on continuing with school.”

Sandra says that without the help of the Food Scholarship, which, like a regular scholarship, provides a generous and reliable supplement for low income students who might otherwise not be able to complete their certificate or degree program, it would have taken longer for her to save up to enroll semester by semester.  She is farther ahead in school since she started the program, and was hired by her current boss (who was in the same program at school as Sandra) because she had advanced further in her classes/degree thanks to Food For Change.  “I am working at a company that I have always wanted to work with,” says Sandra, “and am able to focus on taking all the classes I need to be where I wanted to be because of the program.”

Sandra says she hopes to get into law later in her academic career.