Frank Schaeffer In Conversation with Nicole Lynn Lewis, Author of PREGNANT GIRL and Founder of Generation Hope, exploring her book, her foundation, and what the future could look like if the U.S. provided real support for young families.
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At age seventeen, Nicole Lynn Lewis, a good student who grew up in a middle-class family, found herself fighting against the prejudices and low expectations that society places upon young women of color who are pregnant: she would never go to college, would always be on public assistance, and her daughter would face the same precarious fate no matter what. But Lewis would defy those odds, graduating with honors from a prestigious college four years later, while working like hell to create a safe, secure life for herself and her daughter.
Pregnant Girl
has been chosen by Stephen Curry
as his Literati Book Club pick
for September!
In PREGNANT GIRL, Lewis—now the founder and CEO of the nonprofit Generation Hope, which helps teen parents prepare for and navigate the challenges of college while raising their children—tells the gripping and at times harrowing story of how she made everything work. But more than a memoir, PREGNANT GIRL reveals exactly how the American system of higher education (and who can access and pay for it) is built on racist and classist assumptions that leave behind a huge portion of the population—and what would need to change to benefit those that would reap the most from a college degree.
PREGNANT GIRL offers a triumphant story of beating the odds, but Lewis does not shy away from showing us why those odds exist in the first place. Without bouts of good fortune along the way, Lewis makes clear that she could not have done what she did—and thousands of others are not so lucky. For example, Lewis was able to:
make her Pell Grant and other loans stretch across all 12 months of the year, each year, for tuition, food and other expenses—today the $6,000 Pell Grant does not even cover half of the tuition at a public college;
get placed in a safe, clean apartment on campus that was designated for families, but first she had to convince the school that she and her daughter even qualified for this label;
buy enough food for her daughter each month because of food stamps and WIC, which required a regular trip to the local welfare office (and thus having reliable transportation, which isn’t a reality for many student parents) and filling out mounds of paperwork; and
work with a dedicated and compassionate financial aid officer at her college, without whom she might not have even known about some of these options—something that teen parents often do not experience because of the prejudices that exist against them in the college community.
Throughout the book Lewis shares stories of the Generation Hope “Scholars” she works with today that further illustrate how hard it is for young parents to even conceive of going to college, never mind staying with it long enough to graduate. But beyond having a degree in order to earn far more money than they ever could without, Lewis argues that college is a valuable experience because for the first time in her life she was able to challenge herself to think bigger, learn about new subjects, and expand her mind beyond what society expected of her—an experience everyone should be able to have.
PREGNANT GIRL is a raw, moving exploration of young motherhood that offers readers a chance to see what it would look like for the U.S. to provide real support for young parents.