Our Safety Net Needs Mending: Hear From JP Alumni

Embedded in our collective consciousness are ideas and traditions that support a foundational principle: We take care of each other. We have each other’s backs. And if you work hard — with some help from family, your community, and even the government — you can create a good life. That can look like Pell Grants, scholarships, and fellowships. It can look like Social Security retirement and disability benefits. That’s the concept of a social safety net: When you fall, your community will catch you.

Yet, too many people slip through the holes in that net, particularly single moms and their children.

About 1 in every 10 Americans is experiencing poverty right now; that includes 1 in 3 single-mother households. A number of safety net programs have helped support families for decades, but the systems that undergird many of these programs end up hurting more than helping.

This is why Jeremiah Program exists in the first place — to mitigate these systemic barriers so that mothers and children have the opportunity to become economically mobile, to build the lives and futures they want for themselves.

Those barriers are very real, though, and our 2025-2026 JP Alumni Fellows took some time to explain just how real they are.

Child Care Is Essential to Moms’ Safety Net

By far, the area in which our fellows felt the most challenge as single mothers was child care; not having that in place is arguably the biggest barrier to their economic mobility. This is why affordable and high-quality child care is a pillar of JP’s public policy advocacy.

“There just aren’t enough affordable options,” said JP Rochester-SE MN alum Nicole, “and the cost of child care is so high that it often feels like we’re working just to pay someone else to watch our kids.”

Availability is one thing; affordability is another.

“We’re trying to secure affordable, education-based child care that often costs more than our paychecks,” said Las Vegas grad Staci. “Many of us work low-wage jobs with unpredictable hours, making it nearly impossible to plan child care or take on any professional growth.”

“We’re doing everything we can — we just need systems that make it possible for us to succeed, not ones that make it harder.” —Nicole, JP Alumni Fellow

Staci wasn’t the only one who made connections among low wages, child care affordability, and the inability to grow financially and professionally. Fargo-Moorhead alum Mellisa recalls having to choose between getting reduced hours so she could care for her child and being stuck: “What I would be working, is it just enough to pay my child care, or do I just stay at this dead-end job and not move up?”

Another system that affected Mellisa’s child care situation was public transportation, which she relied on. “When I first moved to North Dakota, I was offered an opportunity to work from the hours of 7:30 to 5:00,” she recalled. “While that sounds great and the pay was great, I had to work with what my local daycare offers, which is normally 8:00 to 5:00. You can see how this can pose a challenge for single moms.”

Nicole tied all of this to the ability to live at the most basic level. “Even when we do find work,” she explained, “the wages often don’t come close to matching the local cost of living — there’s a real living-wage gap here.”

A single mom’s access to affordable, high-quality child care is tied to every other system and institution she interacts with: higher education, work, health care, transportation, you name it. Child care is often the first thread to give in her safety net, and the whole net begins to fail soon after.

Austin alum Molly illustrates this fact well: “Kids get sick a lot, and when they get sick, what do you have to do? You have to miss work sometimes,” Molly said. “With those subsidies, if the kids are sick too much and they miss too much daycare, you lose those subsidies.”

In addition to losing those all-important subsidies, moms can lose their jobs, creating a vicious catch-22. “If you’re the only one caring for your child and you have to miss work, that could cost your job, and then that costs your economic mobility,” Molly explained. “So it feels like with child care, there are just land mines all the way down the road.”

The Benefit Climb and the Cliff

Government benefits like SNAP, WIC, Section 8, and more comprise a safety net that millions of Americans depend on to get by. It can make or break a single mom’s ability to meet her family’s most basic needs. Despite the popular assumption that moms using these benefits are “lazy” or “gaming the system,” obtaining and retaining them requires lots of time, documentation, and rigorous — sometimes unfair — standards.

Nicole breaks down the rigors of these processes:

Each program — child care assistance, housing, food, transportation — has its own application forms to fill out, documents, and eligibility rules. It’s like running a maze that never ends. As a single parent, I’ve spent hours on phone calls, waiting on hold, uploading documents, dropping off paperwork, and attending required appointments just to keep the support I already have. Every program has a different worker, and most of the time, they don’t answer because their caseloads are so heavy. Then you wait for days for a callback. All of this took away from the little time I had to work, study, or simply be with my children. It’s exhausting, it’s frustrating, and it’s unpaid time that most people never see, but this is the reality for so many single parents.

She adds that, if a recipient gets a slight raise and now earns over a certain amount, those necessary benefits are now gone. Consider that scenario alongside the one that Molly described: losing child care subsidies because a child misses too much daycare due to illness. Each of these is an example of the benefit cliff.

The possibility of this sudden drop in support that families need can happen across benefits. Rochester alum Beth illustrates how this can play out:

Let’s just say you get the food stamps, you get the housing, you get the healthcare, and the child care all subsidized with the government while you’re going to school. And as soon as you’re done with school and you get your full-time job — your job that makes over $40,000 a year, which still is above the poverty line, but we all know with the way inflation’s going right now, it’s really not enough to actually live comfortably — you still hit that benefit cliff. You’re going to lose all your benefits.

Beth named support with housing, food, and healthcare. Minneapolis alum Rhea also pointed to healthcare, as well as quality daycare. It can all be gone in an instant when families still need it so much: “You have to maintain a certain income so that you can keep certain things that you desperately need while knowing you could do and achieve much more, and so it is a cycle,” she explained.

It is a cycle that many single mothers enter because they do what they must to take care of their children and build strong futures for their families.

These benefits are an essential part of the safety net for millions of families — and the policies and systems behind these benefits often fail to support them.

We Need Systems That Work for All Families

Moms who are parenting alone and living off a single income — and pursuing higher education, like JP moms — are doing their best. And the systems that should be providing a safety net often exacerbate the need for a net in the first place. Still, moms like our JP moms are making miracles happen for their families every day. Access and opportunity are key to those miracles.

“Economic mobility is possible, but the pathway isn’t smooth,” reflected Baltimore alum Brittney. “It requires incredible resilience, a lot of strategy, and, often, support from community programs or people who understand how these systems work.”

Staci also noted the importance of community support for single moms, stating, “Unlike others, we often don’t have access to social capital or professional networks that open doors. These aren’t personal failings; these are structural barriers that we’re going through every day.”

Minneapolis alum Amanda identified opportunity and access as key to economic mobility as well. She found both during her time at JP, not only as a program participant but also as a member of her broader community.

“It was access to mentors like [former JP national board chair] Sue Hayes that helped me find an internship at General Mills, that led me to have a full-time position, that inspired me to keep going,” Amanda recalled. “It was that boost and belief in me that instilled an ongoing confidence to pursue my dreams, eventually leading me to open my own businesses and, in turn, help support and lift up those small businesses, those single moms, those community members that I was interconnected with.”

“Single moms don’t lack motivation nor capability — we’re navigating systems that weren’t designed with us in mind.” —Brittney, JP Alumni Fellow

For St. Paul grad Karina, witnessing how peers from more affluent neighborhoods had greater access to knowledge about how systems work, including local government, was eye-opening. Even more so, it taught her how these inequitable, ZIP code-based information funnels can affect someone’s life trajectory.

“Because I grew up in an area where our property tax didn’t fund our schools as much, I came into a system where I had to learn it all by myself,” she said. “In fact, I will say that I am still learning.”

Because single moms are daily crafting solutions for themselves and their families, it would behoove our communities to scale their expertise. Karina believes this deeply.

“Some of the things that can create change within communities is having people like myself go into these communities and tell them about these resources and about things that they can take advantage of and having them realize how important civic engagement is — not just to be engaged politically but to understand how the system works.”

That’s exactly what our JP Alumni Fellows are working on; they use their lived experience and expertise to advocate for policies that support single mothers and their children.

The powerful thing is that so many single moms still hold onto the hope that things can get better. As we say at JP, moms dream in threes: for themselves, their families, and their communities.

If we listen to them, the safety net can hold every family and every community that needs its support. If we listen to them, our policies and our communities will be better for it.

Did our alumni moms’ experiences resonate with you? A monthly gift goes further to support JP families.