JP Alumni Fellow Story: Jill Heltemes
JP Alumni Fellow Jill Heltemes encourages moms to find their community because that support can make all the difference for their families.
The 2024-2025 Jeremiah Program Alumni Fellows are using their experiences, expertise, and stories to advocate for other single moms and their families. For 2009 JP Minneapolis alum Jill Heltemes, being part of a supportive community is central to her experience. This is her story.
My name is Jill Heltemes, and I am from the Minneapolis campus. I graduated in 2009, and I have one daughter. Her name is Samara Jade, and she’s 20.
What drew me to JP was many things. There’s the financial stability, financial support, community support, if you think about it: feeling safe with all the women and children and people like you. I think the community was impactful because I actually felt safe. Having a community where you feel accepted, you can be yourself, being a single mom alone and having the safety and stability is very important because we all need that, let alone children, especially.
If you’re not feeling so good inside yourself, being around others and helping others might make you feel better. … Having community and helping others makes everybody feel good!
Believing in this program, I’ve always wanted to give back, so the fact that I’m also in the fellowship has been a goal to give back to the community and to Jeremiah. That sense of helping others and being around the community made me feel good as a person, and also helping others strive to be better is very important. When oneself doesn’t have support and doesn’t have that growing up and having and supporting others, it’s an important thing, not just to give but also to receive.
I believe JP taught me a lot. One, it taught me a lot of things that I needed to look at myself when I was in Empowerment [and Leadership] that I didn’t know that I needed. That grew me as a better person and as a better mom, for one. Two, JP put stability for my daughter. Until this day, she thinks it was such a great experience for her childhood. And I believe the coaching skills, the Empowerment classes, the community of actually knowing people like you, the sense of self, really put me in a different place, being in Jeremiah. I kind of valued and learned things on a different level that I don’t feel like you could get anywhere else.
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