Last fall, I rode my bike to the home of one of our Horizons families, less than a mile away from St. Richard’s Episcopal School. Many of our families live in the mid-north community, and most within a few miles of St. Richard's.
Nicole’s home is inviting, with a little fence out front and colorful plants on either side of the door. It’s the kind of place that you can walk into as a stranger and feel at home, where I imagine a single mom and her kids share a lot of joy together. She welcomed me inside for our interview, and introduced me to Quintarius, Quinnija, William, Quintez, and Mocha, the family rabbit who roams the house and greets visitors like a dog.
While Mocha hopped around and the kids popped hotdogs in the microwave, Nicole explained that her family has attended Horizons since 2013 and four of her five children come to our program each summer. She initially heard about Horizons from a teacher who took an interest in her son, William, and offered to pay the $25 application fee for him to attend.
"Summers before Horizons were very stressful. I worked all summer, and there's a lot of stuff in this neighborhood that should not go on around kids so they were exposed to things that I couldn't stop them from being exposed to," Nicole explained.
She told me her family lives in a "high-crime, drug area," and that sometimes all parents are concerned about is finding a safe place for their children to go during the day. The problem is, Nicole's income as a single mom is not high enough to afford many camps nearby. When she found Horizons, she knew she wanted all of her kids to attend for as long as they could.
"To have Horizons to step in to this community, right here in the middle of everything, and to be an outlet for these children so they have somewhere to get a nutritious meal and can be a kid and laugh and have fun...I just want to thank everyone at Horizons and St. Richard's for that."
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