Hi, my name is Debbie Galeziowski.
I'm a senior anthropology major and a Frances Perkins scholar.
This summer I interned at the Care Center in Holyoke
as a tutor.
The Care Center in Holyoke offers alternative education
to young mothers who need to take the high school
equivalency exam.
But they do more than that, because they actually
put structures in order for them to be
able to negotiate some of the barriers that keep them
from being in the classroom.
And my motivation for being there
would be that I'm a non-traditional student,
and I understand some of those difficulties,
entering the classroom with other things
going on in your life, or being away from the classroom
and not understanding how academia works.
And it was a challenge for me, so I
felt like it would be good to be in a place like that.
So the Care Center breaks down barriers for women.
They have on-site child care.
They actually pick up mothers and their children each morning
and drive them there.
They have car seats in vans available,
so all they have to do is get out of their house,
get in the car, and they're there,
and their children are safely there with them.
There's a nurse practitioner on-site in case of anybody
experiencing some kind of illness,
or their children do, and that keeps them
from missing a day of school because of an illness.
And they also have birth control,
certain things like that.
And then they have access to other health care needs
if they need to.
They are fed every day.
There's breakfast and lunch for the students
and their children.
And a lot of these students come from homeless shelters,
and they're very poor, and there's
a lot of food shortages in their families.
So it's really good to feed them.
And I'm just going to tell you a little bit
about some of the really cool things, the result they had.
75% or Care Center graduates enrolled in college,
compared to 43% of high school equivalency earners elsewhere.
And 94% are women of color.
100% of Care Center women are low income,
and 52 [? high set ?] students were involved in college level
courses in 2015.
And they actually offer those at the school.
And now they have Bard college in.
And when mothers receive their high school equivalency,
they can start taking classes on-site,
which is actual college credits from Bard college.
And it's a really, really cool opportunity.
And they also have a Clemente Course
in humanities that's offered there
for usually low-income women.
And they offer a lot of resources with that also.
They offer books, and child care, and a lot of other things
that help them participate in the academic world.
And my responsibilities there were I was a tutor, obviously,
so I worked one-on-one with many different students.
And mostly because I'm not very good in math,
I tutored social studies, and writing,
and language, some of the specific things
that were going to be on the test.
And each morning, I would go and visit with the teachers,
and they would tell me who was going to be testing soon.
And then we would make a plan about what
we were going to be going over.
And I would gather up the material,
and I would work with the students one-on-one.
And so that's pretty much what I did.
But I also was involved in other activities that were
happening at the Care Center.
So not only do they have education,
they have other things, arts, and poetry,
because they look at the woman as a whole.
And they offer her things maybe she
can't find in her neighborhood, where her world is really
small because she's a mother.
So she might want to look at some other opportunities.
She might have to experience things.
So they have actually an art teacher on-site.
And they do painting, sculpture, glassblowing.
The art teacher there actually has a studio in Holyoke
where he does glassblowing, and so he takes them
to Hampshire College.
So they go on some really cool things
where they probably wouldn't have the opportunity
to do that, just going to take their GED test somewhere.
So it's a really incredible resources for these women.
And another really cool thing that goes on there,
is they have poetry classes.
And they have a poetry teacher that works there specifically.
And she brings in poetry from Emily Dickinson, just anything
that she can think of.
And then from there, they have a writing group,
and they write their own poetry.
And that's very healing for some women to write down
their feelings, or just whatever they feel like writing.
They also publish a book with poetry.
It's called the Nautilus II.
Every year they publish it.
And when I was there this spring,
they did a reading at the Odyssey Bookstore,
and the Odyssey Bookstore has that book for sale.
So that's a really cool thing.
Another thing is they have athletics.
So what's better than mind, body, and spirit?
They have a rowing team that actually participates
in the Regatta in Holyoke, and they won the trophy this year.
And they've won it multiple years.
So that's a picture of the girls that I actually worked
with on the boat in the river.
And three days a week, they would have a team building,
and they did that.
And then there was yoga.
I would go to the yoga studio in Northampton.
There was Frisbee classes.
So just a lot of things that maybe they
wouldn't have the opportunity.
So that would keep them coming back, right?
Because that's really important.
The challenges.
Well, obviously, too many subjects
that I wasn't familiar with-- math, and history,
and social studies, since I'm not really familiar with that.
That's not my academic study.
It was challenging.
I was a learner, along with the students I was tutoring.
I was learning a lot with them.
A lot of them had some problems with vocabulary, perhaps.
They didn't understand what a lot of words meant.
So it was really cool, because for me,
that was really a big challenge when I started school.
So I was able to teach them some of the ways
that I learned, like writing things down,
looking words up in the dictionary constantly.
And then entering their space as a white woman
from Mount Holyoke College.
They didn't know what to think of me, right?
Because it's, like, are you a teacher?
Who are you?
Like, you're old, and you're here, and what do you do?
I was able to be a student along with them, and share
that I'm actually having the same struggles as they are.
It's hard for me to write a paper.
And it's hard for me to-- So I was
able to get through some of those challenges.
And learning how to evaluate each student's
specific learning style.
And here's a nice picture of a graduation picture.
The lessons I learned is that I really
enjoy working with women in a nonprofit.
I feel like my education was so uplifting for me,
and I really look forward to doing some kind of work
in the future that would be empowering or uplifting
to women in particular.
And it was really exciting to work
in a place that looks at a person
as a whole, instead of just everyone
needs to get their high school diploma.
But they saw how, well, why is it hard for them to do it.
How can we make it easier?
How can we make it work?
And so that was really exciting.
And when I worked in the CBL, or when I took a class with CBL
last year, I learned about some nonprofits and some
of the things that people do.
And I was able to connect with the Care Center.
I was able to take that knowledge
and bring it into an internship and learn some things from it.
It's not going to be for everybody.
So I get excited about it.
It's I think it's the greatest in the world,
but all the students don't think the same thing, right?
So that's hard, sometimes, to take it.
And so we have to learn how to manage that.
And my last slide is, this summer 41 students graduated.
It was the highest number they've ever had in history.
All right. [INAUDIBLE] to be with that group
when they graduated.
And it was really great.
And I want to thank [INAUDIBLE] Mount Holyoke Lynk
for my funding, and [? Allen Goud-Garden ?]
for moderating, and having some really cool classes where you
get excited to do community work,
because I wouldn't have known about it.
And the Care Center, of course.
And my panel members, it was great to meet you all
and work with you.
And thank you.