Sophomore Kami Graham is balancing her UWM college classes, a job and a two-year-old son — all while helping care for her mother, who has cancer.

Nicole Rose, a UWM senior in criminal justice, is on the go from 8 a.m. to 9 p.m. some days because of work, the responsibilities of motherhood and college classes. Rose, who wants to become a lawyer, took care of her younger brothers after her mother died, and is now raising her own daughter with the help of her former mother-in-law.

Graham and Rose are just two of the students benefiting from the Life Impact Program, an innovative new partnership between UWM and the Jane Bradley Pettit Foundation designed to help low-income students with children break their families out of the cycle of poverty.

The program, announced in October, is funded through a $2 million gift from the Pettit Foundation, and will provide these students with financial aid, career development opportunities, childcare assistance, personal coaching and other resources to help them complete their college degrees and move into satisfying careers.

Starting with 12 students during the current 2005-06 academic year, the program will expand to involve more than 60 students by the 2010-11 academic year, for a total of 217 scholarships over the six years of the pilot. After the pilot project is completed, UWM will seek funding from other community organizations to continue the program. 

“The trustees of the foundation wanted to provide funding for programs that would help people move beyond poverty,” says Cecelia Gore, program officer for the Pettit Foundation. “That is very much in line with Mrs. Pettit’s goals for the foundation.” 

The Life Impact program, funded through a $2 million gift from the Jane Bradley Pettit Foundation, was announced at a campus reception in October 2005. At the podium is Cecelia Gore, Pettit Foundation program officer. Other speakers at the event included UWM Chancellor Carlos E. Santiago, State Sen. Lena Taylor and a representative from U.S. Rep. Gwen Moore’s office. The program is designed to help low-income students with children break the cycle of poverty.


In addition to creating a model that supports the efforts of highly motivated students who have children and need access to financial resources to succeed, Gore says, the pilot project also aims to demonstrate to legislators that supporting higher education is more economically beneficial to low-income people than cycling them in and out of government-funded programs.

“It is our hope that the outcome will also increase the university’s and the state’s efforts to generally improve the educational attainment of low-income adults so they can reach personal goals, provide for their families and fully participate in an increasingly knowledge-based U.S. economy,” Gore said at the reception announcing the Life Impact Program. “Not only will the lives of our esteemed students be enhanced,” she added, “but the impact on the lives of their children and their children’s children could prove remarkable.”

U.S. Rep. Gwen Moore, long an advocate of education support for low-income families, notes that the program’s goals resonate with her, since she went to college while raising a family. “This program invests in the long-term self-sufficiency of the families of participants, increasing the likelihood that they will secure and maintain employment that offers benefits and family-supporting wages.”

Many on-campus and off-campus resources will be tapped to provide the necessary support for the program participants, says Natalie Reinbold, the program’s “life coach.”

Reinbold will work directly with students to maximize services that can be provided on campus, and will also work with government and social service agencies that provide assistance to families.

UWM’s Department of Financial Aid will assist students with financial matters, and the Children’s Center will help with childcare issues. UWM’s academic departments, the LINKS Peer Mentoring Center, the Women’s Resource Center and the Office of Adult and Returning Student Services will provide support when needed.

Graduate students and tutors will work directly with the students as well. UWM’s Career Development Center will help students get practical job market experience in their field before graduation, and follow and support their progress for six to 12 months after graduation.

“The university is deeply grateful to the Pettit Foundation for this gift,” said Chancellor Carlos E. Santiago. “Accessibility and affordability are among our greatest challenges at UW–Milwaukee. By funding this inventive, exciting new program, the Pettit Foundation is reinforcing this university’s long tradition of welcoming and supporting nontraditional students. These students, their families, our university and the Greater Milwaukee community will all benefit.”

Life Impact Profile:

Kami Graham

Kami Graham and her son, Kamani

“I’m doing this for my mother and my son,” says Kami Graham, 32, who is majoring in community education with a minor in psychology. She also is working on a certificate in Cultures and Communities, and eventually hopes to become a school psychologist.

Graham’s mother has provided encouragement and inspiration, as well as help with child care. “My mother wasn’t able to finish high school, and I want my son (Kamani, now 2 years old) to know how important it is to get an education.”

Graham works in UWM’s Department of Foreign Languages and Linguistics. After starting college years ago and dropping out, she took a class through UWM’s Odyssey Program, which offers free classics and humanities courses to low-income residents. That inspired her to go back to school full time.

Becita Justine Fields

Becita Justine Fields and her daughter, Makayla

Becita Justine Fields, a sophomore Clinical Laboratory Sciences major in the College of Health Sciences, has seen family members suffer from AIDS, Alzheimer’s, and cancer, inspiring her to find ways to bring more preventive health care to underserved communities. Her plan is to go into public health work, with an eventual goal of working for the Centers for Disease Control. “I want to make something of my life.”

With support from her father; her sister, Belinda; and her 13-year-old niece and sometimes babysitter, Deshanea, she commutes daily between her job as a school bus driver for the Milwaukee Academy of Science, the UWM campus and her home on Milwaukee’s Northwest side. Her daughter, Makayla, who just turned 4, is at UWM’s Children’s Center, so Fields can sometimes visit her between classes. It would be helpful to live closer to campus, says Fields, but it just isn’t in her budget.

A veteran, Fields attended GeorgiaMilitaryCollege while in the service, but was unemployed when she started college. Now that she’s working and going to school full time as a single parent, she’s grateful for both the financial aid and personal support the Life Impact Program will offer.

Nicole Rose

Nicole Rose and daughter, Malaika

Nicole Rose, 26, is nearing the end of the first phase of a journey that has taken her from a poverty-stricken community in central Illinois to a nearly completed criminal justice degree.

Her ultimate goal, she says, is to become a lawyer or judge. As a teenager, she found herself on the wrong side of the law, and that has inspired her to want to work with others who, like her, don’t have the financial resources and family support to deal with legal problems.

One of her early inspirations was a state’s attorney who taught a government class at her junior college. “He said they wouldn’t hold my background against me if I wanted to become a lawyer, and that was my go-ahead.”

After spending time those important first years at home with her now 8-year-old daughter, Malaika, Rose returned to college full time. She transferred from the University of Illinois–Chicago to UWM for economic reasons, and so that she could be near her former mother-in-law, her only family support.

Her former mother-in-law works as a secretary at the school Malaika attends, and provides after-school care for her granddaughter on those days when Rose has late classes.

Rose, who works in UWM’s Print Shop, has been able to arrange her class schedule around her work. However, like many working student-parents, she was juggling a lot of expenses with a limited income. When she received word she’d received the Life Impact scholarship, she was worrying about how she was going to pay the balance on her summer school tuition and her daughter’s fees at the UWM Children’s Center. “This really gave me some peace of mind.”