On the Rise Series: Harnessing Your Advocacy
As a former student parent, Ascend PSP Parent Advisor, and now Student Advocacy Coordinator at Generation Hope, I have been provided a myriad of platforms to elevate the student parent experience, and I am grateful for all the skills I learned to self-advocate. These skills have allowed me to not only advocate for myself but for the nearly four million other student parents across the country.
It was important for me to help make a change within my own state of Maryland. As a former staffer at the Maryland General Assembly, it was easy to know where to begin and who to go to, but it didn’t mean that the task itself to request state-wide data collection on parenting status was an easy feat. In this first installment of the Ascend’s new On the Rise: Student Parent Leadership blog series, I share how I approached my advocacy – and steps you can take to co-create effective solutions with student parents.