Bringing up a family requires the full-time attention of the mother. She stayed at home, not because she could not go out to work, but because she was the best person to raise the kids. It was the father’s duty to be the breadwinner of the family. But in the old days, there was an extended family and good neighbors who stepped in to fill the void if something happened to him. Today, families live isolated and alone. A single mother has no one to help her. She must do her job of caring for the children while working to earn the money needed to support her family. This is very difficult if she cannot get a good job because she does not have a college education.
With only a menial job paying minimum wages, she cannot afford to get a Bachelors degree. She has no hope of getting a white collar job. Fortunately, there are free grants for single mothers to get a college education. Officially, these are scholarships which any American citizen can receive, irregarding race, religion or gender. In reality, their core EFC calculations tend to favor single mother families, giving them more money to pay their college tuition fees.
These single mother grants can be found on the federal government’s FAFSA website. The pre-requisite is that the single mother must already be accepted by a college as a student. She will enter her college tuition fee and family income (plus supporting proof), then wait for the results. Assuming success, she will then take the results to her college’s financial aid office to go through the further steps of the grant application.
Not all colleges (or the departments within) participate in every federal government grant program. For example, many are not in the Federal Work-Study program or Perkins student loan program. However, any accredited college should be participating in the Pell grant, FSEOG grant and Stafford loan programs.
Getting enough money to pay the college tuition fees is just one problem. Another big problem is that your typical single mom has to work overtime to get enough money to support her family’s expenses. But her college studies will interfere with that. She has two choices – get a better paying job or cut her living expenses.
Both choices are problematic. But if she is only receiving minimum wages from her current job, she should strongly consider trying to get accepted into the Federal Work Study program. This federal government grant pays market rate wages to students doing part-time work at government offices and non-profit charitable bodies. She could potentially make the same amount of money while doing less work.
The second choice, cutting her living expenses, is also not easy. However, it is always surprising how few people are aware of the food stamp program, SNAP, and their state’s subsidized housing programs (the details vary by state – some help the poor, while others only help the middle class). The former reduces her family’s cost of buying food, while the latter can potentially help cut down the cost of her family’s rental.
Apart from the federal government and state governments, non-profit charitable organizations are also major sources of free grants for low-income single mothers. While they generally give much less money than the government, getting an extra $1500 from two or three charitable grants for education can still help out a lot.
Working, studying for exams, and bringing up the kids all at the same time can be pretty overwhelming. But a single mother who wants to save her family from the trap of poverty has no choice. But as has been often said, “where there is a will, there is a way.” A sufficiently determined woman will often find herself receiving grants for single mothers from unexpected quarters.
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