JP Alumni Fellow Story: Kylie Schultz

The 2024-2025 Jeremiah Program Alumni Fellows are using their experiences, expertise, and stories to advocate for other single moms and their families. JP Fargo-Moorhead alum Kylie Schultz firmly believes that owning and sharing our stories can help others and turn pain into something beautiful. This is her story.

My name is Kylie Schultz. I’m 27 years old. I’m from the JP Fargo campus. I graduated in 2022, and I’m a current MBA grad at MSUM, and I’ll be graduating this summer of 2025. I have an 8-year-old daughter named Mataia, and she’s excelling in second grade.

I was very young when I became pregnant. I was 18 years old. I aged out of foster care, I didn’t have any family around me when I moved to Fargo-Moorhead, and I fell into an abusive relationship after losing custody of my child. I learned about the Jeremiah Program, and only through getting involved in the Empowerment course was I able to have the courage to leave that relationship and, ultimately, choose the relationship with my daughter over a relationship with someone that wasn’t good for me. I was able to put my life back together and say, “I’m turning the page on that chapter, and I’m going to use it to fuel a wonderful future for my daughter and I and break those generational cycles of trauma and poverty.”

A systemic change that I would like to see would be providing more scholarships for single mothers that are going to school. Particularly for me, I received a lot of help in my undergraduate career through educational training vouchers, aging out of foster care, among other scholarships that I was able to find through JP.

It is difficult to share different parts of your life that may not be comfortable sharing, but ultimately, we want to be able to turn our traumas and our hurts into something beautiful and helpful.

I was offered many different speaking opportunities and leadership opportunities through Nexus Path, a foster care agency, as well as the juvenile justice state advisory group. I was a gala speaker. I got to be on resident council and now on the fellowship. I am currently on the board of directors for Nexus Path Family Healing, a foster care agency. I’m also on the Juvenile Justice State Advisory Board, and I would have never taken those opportunities had it not been for that confidence that I gained in Empowerment, as well as having that support surrounding me with the JP staff.

I think that I’ve always wanted to give a voice or advocate for people that I feel similar to or that have gone through similar struggles as me because I know what it felt like to be voiceless or to be hopeless and in despair, and you can’t really see out of your situation.

You don’t have to wait to heal or be happy or serve your community until the finish line. You get to enjoy the whole journey — in the ups and the downs and the painful parts and the successes — and just knowing that, holistically, your past and the traumas don’t define you as a whole, but the whole thing does, the whole healing journey.

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