For seven years, Chastity Lord has led Jeremiah Program (JP) through a stretch of American life that has tested families on every front: a pandemic, a racial reckoning, inflation, and a steady rollback of the supports working parents rely on. In place of her usual letter opening this issue, she talked about the past seven years while cooking Sunday dinner for her family, tracing what those years have confirmed, what listening across nine cities has taught her, and why she believes the country’s next great coalition will be built around single mothers. Like this issue of Imagine, the conversation moves from the narrow to the broad and across JP’s three commitments: to do the work, to foster community, and to influence the story this country tells about single moms.

DO. The work itself

You started at Jeremiah Program seven years ago. What has your JP journey been like?

I started in September 2019. Think about what that means. By March 2020, we were wiping down our groceries. By that May, it was George Floyd’s murder. Almost everything that has happened since has happened on top of that.

What drew me to JP was its discipline. It wasn’t trying to boil the ocean. It was focused: single mothers, young children, two generations at a time, disrupting generational poverty. A lot of organizations want to take on poverty for everyone, and I understand the impulse, but it can be diluting. JP knew exactly who it served.

I was also drawn to where JP was. We were in seven cities then — we’re in nine now — and they looked like America. I’ve had the opportunity to live in towns of 10,000, where you can count the streetlights, as well as in large cities. However, I’m a city girl through and through, and most of America doesn’t live in large urban centers. If you’re serious about shifting the conversation and the policy around single mothers, there’s real value in being in Fargo, North Dakota, and Rochester and Austin, not only Brooklyn and Boston.

As for what JP saw in me — on my first day, I lost my older sister. I’m the middle of three girls, and Kerrie passed the day I started. What may have surprised people is that I didn’t off-ramp; I went 10 toes down. The work reaffirmed why I was there. I like to say that if JP had existed when I was a kid, I would have been a JP kid. My sisters would have been too. My mother would have been a JP mom. Kerrie’s death is still teaching me things — about courage, about the fragility of time. I call her my aggressive angel.

You’ve said education was the lever that disrupted your own family’s cycle of generational poverty. Does the personal ever make the professional harder to carry?

I’m a deeply spiritual person, and I have never felt the personal and the professional intersect like this. Honestly, it makes the work more powerful, not harder. We are supporting more than 3,000 mothers and children across our nine campuses and growing alumni network — plus a growing coalition of 1,800 single mothers across 43 states. My day-to-day isn’t working directly with single moms, but I visit all nine of our campuses, and I get to know moms. There have definitely been times when a mother was affirmed just by seeing me in this seat and my being able to tell her I was raised by a single mom, that we were low-income, transient, and housing unstable, all the euphemisms, and that I am one generation away. I am the children they’re raising. I’m an example of the power of programs like JP and a robust social safety net.

My mother’s big bet was education. I always knew I would go to college, even though no one knew how we would pay for it. My two sisters and I are first-generation college graduates. I’m under no illusion that education is a cure for inequity. It is not — full stop. But it changed the way I dream, and it’s hard to dream things you don’t know exist. You don’t have to share our families’ experiences to do this work well, but I’d be lying if I said it isn’t surreal at times.

Seven years is long enough to watch a theory of change get tested — by a pandemic, economic shocks, shifting political winds. What has it confirmed for you about the two-generation model?

This has been the most challenging stretch of my professional life and, to be honest, my personal life. When I started, my son had just turned 4; he’s 11 now. We were living in Brooklyn, an epicenter of the pandemic. New job, following a 20-year founding CEO, grieving my sister — and then George Floyd was murdered, and two of our oldest campuses are in Minneapolis and St. Paul.

The pandemic was a flashlight. It took a virus and illuminated the inequities that were already there — in health care, in our schools, in the justice system, in the workforce, and in housing. We got the vaccine, we tried to go back to normal, and what it had shown us was still there. Racial unrest, inflation, rising gas and housing prices, and just this past year, SNAP and WIC freezes and federal layoffs. Ask who has been disproportionately affected each time. Women. Women with small children, lower-income families, and Black and brown families. Then ask who Jeremiah Program serves: check, check, check. We have been sitting in the eye of the storm.

What’s different about these seven years isn’t that hardship exists; we have always known hard seasons. It’s that it has all arrived at once, quarter after quarter. In that same window we’ve seen affirmative action fall, the right to choose fall, and the Voting Rights Act weakened. It has been hard to play catch-up; the river is wide and the boat is small. What it has confirmed is that the two-generation model isn’t a nice idea. It is the most rational response to a moment that keeps hitting families from every direction at the same time.

FOSTER. Community and coalition

JP hasn’t just survived this period; it has grown. What has that required?

So much of it has been community. During my tenure JP has increased the number of active families served by over 600%! That has nothing to do with any one person. It’s a constellation of stars: a growing donor base, local board members, community partners, and volunteers central to the work. We’ve met the moment year after year, and I’m proud that in 2025, 84 cents of every dollar went directly into programming — an investment in women and children and in the infrastructure to keep widening our impact.

You’ve visited every campus and listened across very different geographies. What has that listening revealed about single mothers and working families that doesn’t make it into policy conversations?

I’ll bet on a grown woman any day. I’ll bet on a mom any day. What’s humbling — and empowering — is realizing the things single mothers care about are universal, across the biggest cities, the Midwest, and small rural towns. Five things, everywhere: child care, housing, food scarcity, mental health, and education.

And the details matter. Child care isn’t just birth to 5. Kids get out of school at 3:15, as if we still live in an agrarian society, so summer and after-school care count too. Housing isn’t just about affordability; it’s about safety and health. I have learned that just because a family qualifies for a Section 8 voucher doesn’t mean there are enough units available — often, a third of families who qualify for vouchers are never able to leverage the resource. And “safe” isn’t only about crime; it’s mold, it’s air quality, the things that make already-vulnerable kids sicker.

Then there’s the cost of everything — what I call the math that doesn’t math. The federal minimum wage is still $7.25 an hour, about $15,000 a year before taxes. Even at $15 or $21 an hour, once you cover child care, housing, after-school care, and the health care these jobs rarely include, it does not work. We’ve been holding community conversations around Nicole Lynn Lewis’s new book, Student Parent, and one finding has stayed with me: There is no state, no city, no county in America where a full-time worker earning the federal minimum wage can afford a modest, two-bedroom apartment. None.

Single moms dream in threes — for themselves, their children, and their communities — and they are constantly trying to show up for all three. Our job is to make that more than a dream.

INFLUENCE. Narrative and what comes next

And then the lens widens — SNAP, public benefits, health outcomes. What has leading this work taught you about what has to change beyond any single program?

We’re in year one of a new strategic plan, and we’re putting a flag in the sand on narrative and civic infrastructure. Every period of real change in this country has been carried by narrative — think of Emmett Till and his mother’s decision to keep that casket open. We are wedded to pulling back the narrative of what it means to be a single mother in America. Part of that is helping people understand the math wouldn’t even math with two people in the home. It gets exponentially harder with one.

Here’s the strategic piece: Single mothers head 80% of single-parent families. When you center a single mom, you bring children into the conversation because she is a parent. You center gender. You bring in community. We’ve organized as a country around gender, around race, around identity — but never around parental status, around single parents specifically. That is a powerful, untapped coalition. When single moms win, women win, and communities win.

The through line is the erosion of economic mobility and our desire to simplify the challenge by taking the parent out of the picture. If a child is food insecure, there’s a food-insecure parent; if a child is housing insecure, there’s a housing-insecure parent. The two-generation model is a three-times play: mom, child, community. The research is clear: The most influential person in a child’s life is whoever is at that breakfast table. So as power moves back to the states on child care, SNAP, WIC, and Medicaid, we see an opportunity to mobilize more than 30,000 single mothers over the next three years, reminding them of their individual and collective power heading into the midterms, the federal elections, and the Census.

This one is about you as a mother. Has the work changed how you parent?

It has, though it’s less about the work than about what we are all living through. I have an 11-year-old son and two nephews, 18 and 21. They call me Yaya. I think a lot about how, 15 or 20 years from now, they’ll read about this moment, and one of them will turn to me and say, “Yaya, what were you doing?” I want to be comfortable with my answer. What a gift to have my background and my journey and to be in this seat, able to help single mothers be seen as a strategic bet for everyone. I just want to be worthy of it.

Seven years in, what do you want to be able to say about this chapter of your leadership?

I want to be known as someone who tapped into her inner Harriet. Harriet had no model to follow. With no model to follow — at a time she wasn’t even considered a full human being — Harriet Tubman bet on herself. But she was also vulnerable enough to enlist others in her vision for something different. If people look back on my time at JP and say, “She bet on herself and her team, and like Harriet, chose not to go it alone; she was wedded to building a constellation of stars,” that would be it. Because we don’t do anything alone. Community really is a verb.

Jasmine Browley is a journalist and entrepreneur who has written for Forbes, ESSENCE Magazine, and more. She runs HLS Communications, a boutique copywriting and PR firm. Learn more at jasminebrowley.com.

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When you design policies and structures that actually work for a single mom navigating child care, employment, and college simultaneously, you’ve built systems that work for everyone.

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