Today, Sara Cumming is a Sheridan professor and proud mom to four adult daughters who are all either enrolled in or graduated from post secondary. But before the advanced degrees, international speaking engagements and research grants, she was a 20-year-old single working mother, balancing the care of an infant with the service industry jobs she was getting by on. Without the chance encounter she had with a stranger 25 years ago, she and her daughters would likely have wound up locked in the cycle of poverty that affects one-parent households disproportionately.
“I have a very unusual life story to be in the position I’m in today,” Cumming says. “My mom was 16 when I was born. My father and her got married before I was born -- their parents made them. By the time my mom was 19, she was divorced with two children. In my house, you started working when you were 14. By the time I was 18, I was living on my own and working full time -- bartending, waitressing, drinking, and very quickly I was pregnant myself at the age of 20.”
A regular at the Niagara Country Club where Cumming was bartending took an interest in her story and started haranguing her: “‘Why aren’t you in school?! What is wrong with you?!’ Go to school!” Cumming recalls, “She was trying to get me to see there was another path. She paid for my application for university. She taught me how to fill out a student loan. She taught me how to get subsidized child care.”
At a first-year Sociology lecture, Cumming got hooked on her life’s work. The professor was talking about how children tend to repeat their parent’s life trajectory.
“I thought no way I’m ever going to turn out like my mom. But the more the professor talked, the more I realized, hey, I’m a poor single mother who has also made poor relationship choices.”
Since that first lecture, Cumming has done three degrees all focussed on the research question of how single mothers become self-sufficient.
Now, as the executive director of the Oakville-based charity Home Suite Hope, Cumming puts her research findings into practice and continues to pay forward the help her mentor gave to her.
The non-profit runs the Homeward Bound Halton program, a four-year “wrap around” service that includes rental subsidies, life skills training, funding and academic support to complete a two-year post secondary diploma, career coaching, mentorship and networking opportunities to help them secure meaningful employment.
Sasha Hanson is one of the 27 single parents currently enrolled in the Homeward Bound program. Living in an Oakville apartment with her five-year-old son, Hanson graduated in June top of her class from Sheridan’s two-year diploma in Community and Justice Services. She is supporting herself with two part-time jobs while she undertakes the application process to fulfill a childhood dream -- becoming a police officer.
The contrast with her life six years ago, facing pregnancy alone and uncertain, could not be greater.
“Being around these empowering ladies has been so life changing,” she says. “Everyone is approachable at any level. It is literally like a family. It’s unlike anything I have ever encountered before. They’ve instilled me with the confidence that I can do it.”
Cumming says the statistics speak for themselves, with all 11 graduates of the four-year program to date successfully leaving social assistance, and 86 per cent finding full-time year-round employment, earning over the Canadian average. The program is currently recruiting three more homeless or precariously-housed single parents to join eleven other parents starting the program this January. Applicants to this stream, funded by the Ontario Trillium Foundation, need to be between the ages of 17 and 24.
For prospective applicants, Hanson has these words of encouragement, “You’ll never be judged. No one will discriminate against you, I can guarantee you that. They will become your family if you allow them to. They will extend a hand to you, and all you have to do is take that hand.”
