JP Alumni Fellow Story: Ebony Williams
JP Alumni Fellow Ebony Williams’ experiences helped shape her as an educator and as an advocate for more openness around mental health.
The 2024-2025 Jeremiah Program Alumni Fellows are using their experiences, expertise, and stories to advocate for other single moms and their families. For JP Minneapolis alum Ebony Williams, her experiences helped lead to her career as an educator and to her advocacy for more openness around mental health. This is her story.
My name is Ebony Williams. I am from the Minneapolis campus at Jeremiah. I graduated in 2007. I have three children: two, which are adults now, and one teenager.
I faced a lot of challenges during that time alone. I didn’t tell anyone that I took medication, I was seeing a therapist, or anything. And it was so difficult for me because of juggling being a mom, school, and then I had a second child, my son, there at Jeremiah too. I went into a deep depression, and I covered it with a smile. The road getting there was treacherous. It was difficult. Lots of tears, lots of joy, but it was hard. I did finish, and I made it through. It was important because I felt like we did it — with my children. We did it all together.
Know yourself. Be true to yourself. Be honest, be open about your feelings with anyone that you can that you trust. There’s a light at the end of the tunnel.
After I graduated from Jeremiah, and then I graduated from Metro State, it was amazing because I was really proud of myself and the dedication that I had. I graduated with a degree in early childhood education, and so I became a teacher. I’ve been a teacher for 19 years, and I recently left that career. But it was amazing because I was doing what I loved, and I was giving back to a community that I love and working with children, helping children, and being that role model for children of color to see themselves in roles that they can be. That was amazing for me, and it was great for my children to see that I accomplished that.
A change that I would like to see, that I would have loved back then, is people being more open and honest about mental illness. It has affected my family, it’s affected a lot of people, and I feel like it affects a lot of people today. Sharing those things would have been really helpful and having someone to talk to, not necessarily to sympathize with me, but to empathize. I think that’s important, and that’s one of the reasons why I went into education.
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