“Having goal, a plan and not giving up”

As a child, I grew up in a lot of houses.

Before my mother purchased a Habitat home, my family rented seven houses and apartments all over town. When my mother found out she was approved for our Habitat home, we lived in an apartment above a small-time drug dealer.

My mom saw buying a home as a way to get us out of the cycle of moving house-to-house, into something affordable and stable. Building a home and working with the Habitat organization was the start of many successes in my life and my family’s.

Building a Habitat home isn’t as simple as getting the keys and walking into a new home. We were required to commit 1,500 sweat-equity hours building our home and other Habitat families’ homes. We walked across town — my mother didn’t have a car — every Saturday morning to work on the build site.

I learned the values of having a goal, a plan and not giving up. My mother was a single mother who was very poor, but she saw the value of homeownership and was willing to work hard for it.

She planned and budgeted so that she could become a homeowner, and that plan came to fruition more than 15 years ago. She met her goal. She served as a guiding figure for me as I went on to fulfill my own goals in life.

I used the values I learned from building our home as tools to reach dreams that no one in my family would have fathomed.

After I received my high school diploma, I decided to continue toward a bachelor’s degree. This was a big goal for me because I had no close family members who were in college. I had to plan because I had to find the means to fund my college education.

On top of that, I challenged myself to complete the coursework in four years. Although it was hard work — I went to summer school two summers and worked many jobs — I graduated in four years with a bachelor’s degree from Temple University, magna cum laude with honors in my major.

I was not finished.