A LETTER TO MACKENZIE SCOTT 
A Transformative Gift at a Transformative Time

Posted on June 7, 2023

Like so many of us working in social justice, lately I’ve been thinking a lot about trust. Trusting people to make the best decisions for their families. Trusting those who have been historically excluded from opportunities with the resources they need and deserve. Trusting the lived experiences of individuals to lead us to the right solutions.

I’ve also thought a lot about how trust has played a role in my own journey – first as a young, Black mother in college and then as a nonprofit leader. Faith is often described as “a belief in the unseen order of things.” Faith – the willingness to believe – is an act of trust. In 1999, when I stepped foot on a college campus as the mother of a nearly three-month-old baby girl, I was trusting my belief that I deserved the opportunity to earn a degree. In 2010, when I started Generation Hope without seed funding, an office, or employees, I was trusting my belief that parents from all walks of life, including teen parents like me, deserved the opportunity to earn a degree. It was a belief in the unseen order of things – the way structures and systems need to change and shift and be reimagined in order for families in poverty to truly thrive.

At neither of these points could I have imagined the trust that you have now put in Generation Hope and our vision for a better world. I am deeply grateful for the multi-million dollar contribution you have made to our work, investing in the success and economic mobility of student parents and their families across the country. 

As you know, Generation Hope is committed to changing the statistic that fewer than 2% of teen mothers earn a college degree before age 30, and more than half of all parenting college students, who make up 22% of all undergraduate students in this country, leave school without a degree. Your transformative gift comes as Generation Hope steps into the final year of our 2024 Strategic Plan – a blueprint that has led to bold, impactful growth and positions us for large-scale change in the years ahead. We are serving more young families than ever across the DC region, and in July we will begin serving young families outside of the region for the first time in our newest community of New Orleans. We are working with 16 higher education institutions across the country, assisting them in transforming their environments to be more inclusive and supportive of parenting students. And more than just bringing our students into existing policy spaces, we are building a new table, placing student parents at the center as the experts of their experiences and the barriers they face, and inviting policymakers and leaders to sit, learn, and take action with us.

With your extraordinary support, Generation Hope’s work has the potential to not only expand what we do today but to also continue serving teen and student parents for years to come. This is an incredible moment for me and for the many people who have been a part of Generation Hope’s journey - our families, alumni, current and former staff, current and former members of our Board of Directors, funders, volunteers, and champions. I am deeply grateful for each and every person whose contributions and support have brought us to the work we do today.

Thank you, MacKenzie, for your trust in me – a mother who was once told college was impossible and Black woman leader who is often overlooked for these types of investments – and in our organization. Your belief in our ability to create true pathways to economic mobility for families and to bring us closer to our vision of a world in which all teen parents and student parents, and their children, have every opportunity to succeed and are empowered to create a better future for themselves, our community, and our world means so much. We are deeply grateful to you for seeing the unseen and for boldly making it a reality.

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