SUCCESS STORIES
Alternative high school bridges gap for students facing barriers
Foster kid. Teen mom. School dropout. Any one of those challenges is hard. But 17-year-old Destiny, a soon-to-be GED graduate at Benton Harbor’s Bridge Academy, isn’t letting all three stop her from pursuing a career in nursing and giving her three-year-old son, Remi, a better start in life than she got.
“Everything was at risk.”
Angelica Hatchew was having trouble making ends meet while she was on early maternity leave for health reasons from her job at Lyons Industries in Dowagiac. Five months pregnant and with two other children, she was afraid of losing her home. That’s when she met Nancy Miller, a success coach at The LINK, a program at United Way-funded partner Kinexus. “She was my backbone,” Angelica says.
Teen girls find inner strength in overflowing support
Difficult home lives, emotional pain, feelings of abandonment, and the need for healthy relationships have created strong bonds among a group of girls at Watervliet High School. One of the girls, Katlynn, was grappling with her parents’ divorce, and her grades were dropping. But Club H2O changed all that.
On-the-go service stops hunger in tracks
Arlene, 77, lives a happy, active life, surrounded by loved ones, in Cassopolis. But she is one of many struggling with food insecurity in Cass County. Seniors are especially vulnerable to food insecurity. In the service area of Feeding America West Michigan, a United Way-funded program, about 46,800 seniors are food insecure.
Healthy transformation for Covert corner store
Laura is busy—as a single mom of five, she needs to find ways to save time. Her employer, the Citgo Station in Covert, is helping her and its customers in the area to do just that—and eat healthier to boot. With the help of Be Healthy Berrien, a collective impact initiative supported by United Way, the Covert Citgo is undergoing a healthy corner store transformation.