More than anything, Heather Lowe didn’t want her children to grow up in poverty.
The 27-year-old had already had more interactions with social services than most ever will. As a child, she had been in and out of foster care and witnessed her parents’ struggle with drug addiction. She had her first child at 19. She soon found herself bouncing between homeless shelters with her infant son. She even did a stint at a domestic violence shelter.
“I needed to do better for my kids. I needed to do better even for myself,” she says. “A lot of people were very much like, ‘All you’ll ever be is a single parent. And you’ll be an uneducated person for the rest of your life.'”
When her son was 2 years old, she went back to school, finishing several associate degrees and then completing a bachelor’s in psychology from California Lutheran University. But even then she struggled to find work that paid enough