JP Alumni Fellow Story: Cristina Guajardo
JP Alumni Fellow Cristina Guajardo is passionate about ensuring moms and their kids can thrive — including advancing affordable child care.
The 2024-2025 Jeremiah Program Alumni Fellows are using their experiences, expertise, and stories to advocate for other single moms and their families. JP Austin alum Cristina Guajardo is passionate about collective work that ensures moms and their kids can thrive — including advancing affordable child care. This is her story.
My name is Cristina Guajardo. I am a 2021 graduate of the Austin Jeremiah campus, and my family consists of Antonio, who is now 7.
A time when I had to make a hard decision was to continue going to school during COVID. During that time, we lost the child care at our campus, and my son was 2 years old. I still had quizzes. I still had tests. I still had research papers. I had a lot of things to do with no daycare and no support. It was just the two of us in our apartment, and I could have easily decided to stop because, at that point, I felt like I had no time to do any of those things and continue to give him the care that he needed and deserved. I chose to figure it out. During the day, we played and at night, when it was time for bed, I would put him to bed and then it was time for me to study.
I graduated, I started my career, I bought a home, and I continue to stay involved in the community.
When much is given to you, I feel that it is our responsibility to make sure that we give it back, that we make sure that the people that come after us have those resources as well. That’s going to help build the community that I want for my son.
Thinking about the community that I want for my son, I see a world, a community where moms are able to thrive and they’re able to give their children the time that they need so that they can grow up and reach their full potential — because they’ve received the tools that they needed.
One of our other nonprofits that I’m involved with, United Way, was very involved in the Affordable Childcare Today, a proposition that was passed, and during their efforts, I tried to make sure that other people knew what this proposition meant, what everybody’s vote meant. And so the very last day of voting, I took my son, Antonio, and we stood outside as poll greeters to make sure that people knew how important that proposition was. As I stood out there with him — not being somebody that is very active in politics, not knowing too much about that — I was able to talk to some other moms that…some of them were going there for the first time, and they had not heard about Prop A. So it made me feel helpful, like I was serving again.
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