The Stories team at the Center for American Progress Action Fund works with storytellers who author op-eds about how policy impacts their lives. The team helps elevate their op-eds.
Immediately after I graduated high school at 19, I fled my unsafe family home and became homeless. I spent the next two years bouncing between friends’ couches and youth shelters, unsure of what to do with my life.
Today, at age 25, I’m a homeowner with a new car and a pension to look forward to when I retire. If you had told me five years ago that my future had all that in store, I’d have thought you were lying. And I definitely wouldn’t have believed that I’d become a union carpenter and one of the few Hispanic women working in construction in Lansing, Michigan. But that’s the truth, and it’s thanks to the pre-apprenticeship and apprenticeship programs I went through.
The above excerpt was originally published in The Michigan Independent.
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