Fierce determination and an effective nonprofit teamed to
provide a new life for a teenage mom
Melissa Mendoza ran by her own rules. While that might be a
romantic notion fostered by Hollywood screenwriters and romance
novelists, for a high-school sophomore, it can spell disaster.
Pregnant at 15 and a mom at 16, Mendoza dropped out of high
school and began a spiral that saw her bouncing from home to home,
including stints with the baby’s father, her parents in Gilroy,
friends and cousins. She was a child raising a child.
Fierce determination and an effective nonprofit teamed to provide a new life for a teenage mom
Melissa Mendoza ran by her own rules. While that might be a romantic notion fostered by Hollywood screenwriters and romance novelists, for a high-school sophomore, it can spell disaster.
Pregnant at 15 and a mom at 16, Mendoza dropped out of high school and began a spiral that saw her bouncing from home to home, including stints with the baby’s father, her parents in Gilroy, friends and cousins. She was a child raising a child.
But it is often said that the mark of true courage is being able to pick yourself up after getting knocked down, not avoiding the punch altogether. Mendoza went back to school and earned her high-school diploma and took additional training in medical billing procedures. She’s employed in a collections department of a San Jose company and recently bought her first car. But she didn’t do it alone. She had the help of a major support network in Gilroy – Community Solutions.
The Gilroy-based nonprofit counseling center is awarding Mendoza and Santa Clara County Supervisor Don Gage the Healing Heart and the Healing Hands awards, respectively – Mendoza for the success she has earned and Gage for the support he has provided the program. Gage was not available to comment on the program by press time.
The awards will be presented at an annual luncheon this Friday, Feb. 10, at Coyote Creek Golf Club.
Supervisor Gage’s history with Community Solutions dates back to when he served as chairman of the board of directors of Bridge Counseling Services, the predecessor to Community Solutions.
“I’ve had the opportunity for a while to observe what [Community Solutions] do and how efficient they are at doing it,” Gage said. “They have done an outstanding job providing care for folks in South County.”
Gage has been instrumental in ensuring that funding remains secure. The larger board had cut $800,000 from the budget for such groups as Community Solutions, but Gage worked to save the funding and eventually oversaw the money restored to the budget.
Mendoza is the first to acknowledge the mistakes in judgment she made while in high school.
“The baby wasn’t planned,” Mendoza said. “When you’re young, you do these things without realizing how it will affect you.”
To Mendoza, the choice was simple. She couldn’t continue in school; she needed to go find a job to support her and her baby – a healthy boy she named Daniel, now 5 years old.
“We were never homeless, but we kept bouncing around,” she said.
It was her father who recommended she check out a program in Gilroy called Community Solutions. She did.
“But I didn’t think it was for me – too many rules,” she said. “And I wasn’t ready for rules.”
So she left the Community Solutions program, a transitional housing effort aimed at helping teenage mothers and their children get a healthy start. The program provides one unit in Gilroy that can accommodate four residents at one time, said Cecilia Clark, a spokesperson for Community Solutions.
The housing program also provides many of the basic necessities for mothers trying to get their lives back on track, such as toiletries and bus passes so the moms can travel to job interviews. But there are rules: Moms can stay for 12 months, and after three months are expected to be working to help defray the costs, and taking job training or working toward obtaining a high-school diploma or an equivalent.
After the moms have spent four successful months in the program, they can register with South County Housing to transition them into their own apartments, Clark said.
After five months away from the housing program, Mendoza said she began to understand the harsh reality of what her life would be like without some kind of additional training.
“I began to see how my life was going,” she said. “All I was doing is living and supporting my baby, but there was nothing for the future.”
Mendoza returned to the housing program, and this time Community Solutions assigned her an advocate from its Family Advocate Program, which provides parent education and child development services.
“They helped me enroll in school and even took me to get my driver’s license,” she said.
The advocate teaches young mothers many of the life skills needed to make it on their own, including how to properly discipline a child, how to play with children, and even the importance of maintaining proper dental care.
“The goal is to prevent child abuse in families that have long-term issues, such as poverty, mental-health issues and unemployment,” Clark said. “It’s also a way to get out with other moms and take field trips together.”
Mendoza began to run by her own rules again, but this time her rules included a clear vision of her and Daniel’s future, and a clearly defined path toward her goals. While she was taking independent study in Gilroy to earn her diploma, she was also working two jobs and attending a weekly parenting workshop.
“I did have a busy schedule,” she said with no hint of the irony that meeting the enormous workload was in fact a compromise with other people’s rules.
For more information on Community Solutions, visit its Web site at www.communitysolutions.org.
