Emma’s  story begins in 2004. At 17 years old, Emma was living with her daughter, at a home for single mothers. Having dropped out of high school to care for her child, Emma was without a high school diploma and learning about the difficulties of finding employment without one.

But then Emma met Gail Russell, former family educator at the Adult Learning Center. For Emma, their meeting would mark the beginning of a new life, both for herself and her child. Gail pressured Emma to pursue her GED. “’Come on, you can better your daughter’s life,’” Emma recalls Gail telling her, and Emma agreed. “Not a lot of jobs want people without any education.” She enrolled in the Adult Learning Center’s GED preparation course and quickly mastered the material. Within a year, Emma had earned her GED.

With her GED, Emma was able to find work as a temporary employee. But bouncing from job to job made her day-to-day life unpredictable, and made raising her child a very difficult task. And beyond that, Emma knew she was capable of more challenging work. For this problem, Gail had another suggestion: college.

Emma rose to this new challenge, enrolling at the Nashua Community College and taking advantage of the Adult Learning Center’s low-cost childcare program, Early Childhood Adventures. With her children taken care of, Emma is able to attend college and do homework. “Schoolwork for me takes my mind off stress,” says Emma. 

“If it weren’t for the Adult Learning Center, I wouldn’t have gone to college,” she says. Emma is majoring in Human Services and will be graduating at the end of the fall semester. After graduation, she hopes to land an internship at Cynthia Day Family Center, a home for drug- and alcohol-addicted mothers. Having witnessed for herself the terrible consequences of drug addiction in her own family, Emma’s ultimate career goal is to find a paying job where she can work with single mothers who are struggling with drug addiction. “I don’t want to be rich or anything. I just want to be stable.”