Housing complex for single parents opening at U of L

By Michael Kennedy

Despite 96 degree heat on Saturday, dozens of volunteers from the University of Louisville were landscaping and helping students move in to their new homes at the Louisville Scholarship House.

This new facility, built at the intersection of Fifth and Bloom Streets will house 54 single mothers, two single fathers and 98 children, when completed in September. Project Women, a Louisville based non-profit organization, manages the facility.

To be eligible to live at the facility, the single parents must be full-time students at an area college – 20 are U of L students.

Terri Carr, a graduate student interning with First Year Initiative, said that many campus organizations were helping out on the project. Saturday also saw many Resident Advisors and students helping out at the event.

“What we are doing this afternoon is an important way for our students and community to see how they can interact with each other,” Vice-provost Dale Billingsley said. “The benefit for the university is to ground the students in the community that they live in.”

Cathe Dykstra, executive director for Project Women, said that all of these families have experienced homelessness, and after exiting the program, 100 percent have found stable housing.

For many of the single parents, their new homes provide the incentive to go to college.

“This is a really big blessing,” said Shamika Adams, a sophomore nursing student and mother of three, who resides in the Louisville Scholarship House “Without [Project Women] I wouldn’t be able to go to school and get the support that I need.”

Adjacent to the Louisville Scholarship House is the Early Learning Campus, a childcare center for children of university students, faculty and staff, due to open in September.

Land for much of the facility came from the university, which owned green space next to land purchased by Project Women. In April 2006, Dykstra approached university officials about using the land. According to Dykstra, they were immediately receptive.

“Immediate affirmation from the university gave us the impetus for this collaboration from the first day,” Dykstra said. According to Dykstra, the university agreed to lease the land for $1 a year for 50 years.

Some of the facility’s residents have expressed great appreciation to the university for the facility, and the opportunities it affords them, including resident Mckayla Portman.

“I think that’s cool that [mom] gets to go to college again.”