Meet Our Grantee-Partner: The Care Center
Mission: To provide opportunities for young mothers who have dropped out of school to gain control of their lives and to acquire the education, resources, and skills for life-long growth, wellness, and economic stability.
The Care Center serves women living in Hampden County, Massachusetts who encounter barriers to finishing high school or pursuing higher education. Over the course of four decades, The Care Center has designed an environment that fosters educational success while meeting the unique needs of its students, most of whom are young mothers. It operates on the belief that a mother’s education helps set her family up for a better life, impacting not only her children, but generations to come.
Economic challenges are pervasive in Hampden County. Nearly 50% of children under six in the city of Holyoke, 43% in Springfield, and 23% in Chicopee live below the poverty level. These families are mostly led by single mothers who face a lack of childcare, food insecurity, unstable housing, or domestic violence. Young mothers looking to improve their circumstances face a conundrum: while obtaining a college education can help them create a better life for their children, traditional educational settings typically do not accommodate their unique needs.
The Care Center’s supportive and creative environment is designed with these students in mind. It operates out of a 19-century brick mansion in Holyoke that has been converted into a school. The first floor houses a daycare for babies and toddlers. On the second floor, counselors and nurse practitioners are available to students seeking counseling and health services. Classes take place throughout the building’s four stories, and student poetry and artwork decorate the halls. The Care Center recognizes that lack of transportation is a barrier to education, so they provide vans equipped with car seats to transport mothers and their children to and from classes. Its rigorous, award-winning HiSET (GED) preparation program, campus visits, the opportunity to participate in college courses for credit, and persistent messages about the importance of higher education prepare students for college.
Each year, more than 75% of the graduates of the Care Center’s HiSET program—all young mothers who had dropped out of high school—continue to college. While Care Center staff are proud of these results, they were disappointed to learn that only 10-15% were completing degrees at the local community colleges, as the same barriers that led them to drop out of high school prevented them from obtaining degrees. The Care Center reached out to longtime partner, Bard College, to design an associate degree program for Care Center alumni. In 2016, the Care Center launched Bard Microcollege Holyoke, pairing a tuition-free, high-quality college education with built-in support for young mothers. The Microcollege boasts a 72% graduation rate compared to 33% for associate degree programs nationally and just 8% for single mothers.
Sheynatais “Shey” River
Poet Tiana Clark signing a book for a Care Center student
In addition to GED and college preparation, The Care Center utilizes an approach called Creative Youth Development, which seeks to ignite a passion for learning poetry and art. Through its Poetry Project, students are given opportunities to read and learn about poetry directly from accomplished poets such as Ross Gay, Terrance Hayes, Ada Limón, and Ocean Vuong, among other acclaimed writers. Poetry exposes students to different perspectives and helps them develop a sense of their place within a broader human context, which they are encouraged to express through writing poetry of their own.
Receiving a spring 2023 Poetry Programs, Partnerships, and Innovation grant from the Poetry Foundation supports the following Poetry Project components:
- A biweekly poetry class in which students learn about contemporary and classic poets and write poems in response.
- The bi-monthly Readers & Writers series, which brings nationally acclaimed poets to Holyoke. Students read the poets’ work in advance and have the opportunity to speak with them directly at public readings. Funding from the Poetry Foundation supported local readings by Kaveh Akbar, Tiana Clark, Ruth Forman, Ross Gay, Terrance Hayes, Major Jackson, Danusha Laméris, Ada Limón, Cheryl Boyce Taylor, Ocean Vuong, Lynn Xu, and others.
- Nautilus II is a high-quality anthology of student poetry and artwork that is organized and designed by a student editorial board with support from The Care Center’s poetry teacher. Students whose work is featured in the anthology participate in an annual public reading and book release event.