SINGLE MOTHERS VILLAGE INTIATIVE

" Single Mothers’ Village. It’s difficult for single mothers to raise children alone. There is an African saying that it takes a village to raise a child. Single mothers can get together and share houses and apartments together with their children to share the childraising and foster community support".


The above passage is another Quote from a blogger name Bronze Trinity. This quote is taken from a post over at Bronze her blog titled 17 plans to help the African diaspora. I have been thinking on ways that I believe could possible help single mothers in thier struggle to provide for thier families. In fact I have been sitting on this particular post for about a year now so here goes.

I believe that a good way to help single mothers would be to create innovative, inspiring and productive Job Training programs that would allow single mothers to be trained in various skills sets while providing free daycare for thier children during thier job training. Now whatever it is they are going to be trained in should be in an area that will allow them to earn enough money to comfortably take care of thier families within the course of a regular work day.


Also thier should be advanced training for those mothers who show extra motivation to improve thier circumstances. I think the single mothers should get some some sort of stipend to be awarded for each class attended by the mothers and that money should be deposited into a personal bank account. Upon Graduation of the program the mothers would be given thier account#s and bank books. In the past I have been a part of Independent Living Programs that provided stipends for the youth in the form of money directly deposited into an individuals bank accounts.

Each year thier is funding for 10,000 school children in Washington DC to participate in summer youth job programs in Washington DC. I know from having worked as a summer youth employee and then later on having supervised them that a lot of these jobs are created solely so that youth will have a chance to earn money. Many of the goverment agencies and private companies that host these youth workers as Job sites do not need them. In fact many of these job sites will accept four or 5 youth workers when they only need 1. What ends up happening is that the youth workers at these sites end up doing and learing very little.

So my attitude is this instead of having youth standing around doing nothing, why not train them and have the youth 16-18 act as child care providers for the children of the mothers who are bieng trained. I remember doing this as my first summer youth job although it was an actual summer day camp for youth of Washington D.C. What I would like to do now is train these youth to provide daycare for single mothers who are in need of or canidates for a job training program such as this one. Such

The schedule would break down something like this.

Thier would be 2 shifts. 7:00-3:30pm 4:00-11:00pm. Here is a sample schedule of a work day.

1) 7:00 -8:00 evaluation and goal setting
2) 9:00-10:00 Internet and Job search training.
3) 10:00-12:00 WebDesign, Nursing, Business, ect, Software learning(tutorials)
4) 12 Lunch
5) 1:00 -3:30 Software training and finacial literacy courses


The second session would repeat the same format as the first sessionn.

Built into these sessions would be competition, collaboration, teamwork, excellence and usefulness. Also the administration of these program should be designed to improve and refine itself with the ultimate goal always bieng progress in the lives of the single mothers who are in these programs. Ladies who show a special skill and leadership should perhaps be funneled back as staff workers of future participants of this program. We must build a sense of empowerment into this program that is relflected by the single mothers and children, the staff workers and the community agencies that particpate in bringing these programs to life. Lastly this program would have a very strong community service spirit mixed in with its application.



Now I know this will cost money but not as much as one might think, a lot of it could be paid for with by money already spent on similar programs that was redirected into these Job training programs for single mothers. We could utilize the services of volunteers and interns to function as staff and advisers.Plus their are already experts working on these very issue, thier are already agency working with single mothers that have gotten great results we should take the best of those ideas to refine this idea and then begin the process of bringing them into extistence.

For Space to run these programs I think we should contact, recreation centers, girls and boys clubs, shcools , churches ect.


We could use the services of Reading is fundemental programs, apply to the Gates Foundation as well as local, state and federal goverment agencies for the extra funds needed for this.

Ill blog more on wholesome and enriching program that could be developed for the children at the daycare. But in the mean time if you know any single mothers or other concerned parties on this matter please invite them to comment with the purpose of refining this idea and working on this issue in a serious way.
Thank You.