An episode of firsts! Our first live episode recorded at the inaugural Ascend Parent Advisor Convening in Aspen, CO in front of an audience of student parents. Co-hosts David Croom and Dr. Daria Willis (President, Howard Community College) are joined by former guests Michaela Martin, Yolanda Johnson-Peterkin, and Ariel Ventura-Lazo to reflect on their journeys and share their dreams and recommendations for the future of the student parent movement.
David Croom: Okay. All right, I guess we're going to get this party started. Also, just to note, we have direct mics, so background noise is totally fine and lauded and we like claps and we like audience feedback. Yes, please give us feedback. Thank you.
All right, so let's get this party started. Welcome to the first ever live recording of our One in Five podcasts. One in Five takes its name from the One in Five college students in the US who are parents. I'm David Croom, I'm associate director for Post-secondary at Ascend at the Aspen Institute. As many of you know, I'm also the son of a student parent.
Daria J. Willis: Hello everyone. I am Daria Willis, the president of Howard Community College in Columbia, Maryland. I am also a former student parent and I am happy to be moderating this discussion with you today David.
Croom: Also, and I'm paid to say that Daria is a 2021 Ascend Fellow as well.
Willis: Why do I keep forgetting that?
Croom: I have to make sure that I add that in.
Willis: Thank you.
Croom: It's great to be on this stage with Daria and with these amazing student parents and alums. First off I want to just do a quick introduction of our illustrious panel. We're honored that you be joined by three student parents and fellow parent advisors. Michaela Martin, Yolanda Johnson-Peterkin, and Ariel Ventura-Lazo.
We're going to introduce each of you and ask you the same question. When and where were you a student parent? First, Michaela Martin, who is a recent law school graduate and an early childhood policy advocate. She's currently the policy and government affairs manager at First Five Orange County. Michaela, when and where were you a student parent?
Michaela Martin:
I started at Linn-Benton Community College in 2013 and then I transferred to Oregon State University for my Bachelor's of Science in speech communication, and then graduated from the University of La Verne with my Juris Doctorate.
Croom: Degrees. Degrees on degrees.
Willis: Yolanda Johnson-Peterkin, AKA, the Ambassador of Freedom. I just have to say that. She is the Executive director of Housing initiatives in the New York City Mayor's Office of Criminal Justice. Welcome Yolanda. Tell us what time of your life were you a student parent.
Yolanda Johnson-Peterkin:
I was a student parent at [inaudible 00:02:33] years ago and I started with my bachelor's. I didn't think that I would have the opportunity to be smart enough to graduate, so I started with my bachelor's at Borough of Manhattan Community College in New York City Community College. Then, I went to Springfield, which is a private college for human services in Massachusetts and it was weekend college, so I got an opportunity to go only on two weekends a month. But they gave you enough work for all month. Then I went into a traditional college Manhattan in Manhattan Hunter College. I graduated and I have a master's in social work.
Croom: Degrees on degrees.
Croom: Ariel Ventura-Lazo is founder of Foundation Fatherhood, LLC, also an alum and new employee of Generation Hope. Welcome Ariel and would love for you to tell us about your student parent journey. When and where were you a student parent?
Ventura-Lazo:
Right. I decided to go back to school for a second time in 2014 after a five-year hiatus. At that point, my son was actually going on four years of age, and so it was a really big decision to transfer from the workforce side and to just dive headfirst into post-secondary education. It was from 2014 at Northern Virginia Community College, to this year at George Mason University, where I graduated with my bachelor's in management.
Willis: Finally again, I am Daria Willis, and I was a student parent while attending Florida A&M University, in the highest of Seven Hills of Tallahassee, while I was working on my bachelor's and master's degrees. As you heard, all of our panelists have the student parent experience and they have been featured in sessions in the seasons one and two of our podcasts, One in Five as well as myself.
What we're going to do to today is talk about their experience centering the way it was as an asset to their careers and their families and celebrating where they are now and where they will go next in the future. Right? Awesome. All right, so let's get started. I want to start our conversation this evening with a story. One of the most detailed accounts of the day-to-day of being a student parent is from your episode Michaela.
There's this highly relatable incident where your son, Ezra, who was a baby at the time, has a disastrous diaper emergency and you end up being just two minutes late to a class with a very strict professor. I have to say, listening to that story and how you get the poop out your hair and all that stuff and only being two minutes late is truly phenomenal, just to say that.
But the best part of that story is that you stand up for yourself in front of this teacher and in front of the classroom you explain what happened and that it was completely out of your control and that you need to attend this class this evening. You sound almost shocked that you were able to articulate your situation in that moment. Start us off with what you most recall about those days and what to you encapsulates being a student parent. It's a three-parter, and-
Martin: This is a lot.
Willis: You've got your JD so you can handle it. What do you think makes student parents so resilient and brave as you were in front of that professor?
Martin: First, I knew that you all were going to ask about the poop story, because that's probably the thing that folks have talked about most since the podcast. I was like, they're going to ask about this. They wouldn't give us the questions beforehand, so you all are aware, but I didn't feel brave in that moment. I think I just didn't care, right? If she was going to kick me out of the class, she was going to kick me out of the class, but I was going to make sure that she was aware of what she was doing and the impact that that was going to have.
I don't know that it was brave. I think I'm stuck on that. It's like what does it make student parents brave? I don't want to say that we're brave. I think that this should be normative, that it should be just something that you do, right? You don't ask a 22-year-old without a kid whether or not they're brave for going to college. It's just something you do. I don't feel brave.
Willis: I'm going to push back a little bit because in your episode you said you told the professor, "And if you don't let me in this class, I'm going to student services." I don't know who you were going to go talk to, but probably somebody who could make some waves to get you in that class. I hear you with normative and all that, but you had all the bravery and all the gumption to say that. I mean, it was truly phenomenal in my personal humble opinion about [inaudible 00:07:16].
Croom: You were like, Michaela's like, "I'm going to think about that." You could jump in, we all...
Martin: Okay.
Croom: In thinking about Michaela's story and the story of so many student parents, as we know from the data from the work that Ascend as well as an Institute for Women's Policy research has done, majority of student parents are women, many of student parents are single mothers and women of color. At 19-years-old, Daria was all three.
Daria, would love for you to share about ways that you relate to Michaela's story, where institutional support is lacking. Teachers, professors, other administrators are not always knowing what to do in order to help student parents. One thing that I would say though that I loved about your episode, was that you did find one person, Mrs. Green, who was willing to take your child, Lyric, at the time and really basically babysit and do whatever you needed to do, have toys in her office, make sure that she was accommodated while you were in school.
You had that one exemplar. But as we know, many exemplars don't exist within these spaces. I would love for you to talk about your story and how to shift institutional supports and also now in your role as a college president. How has institutional support shifted since your time in school?
Willis: Mm-hmm, and therein lies the problem, David, because I had Mrs. Green and I'm on a campus of probably 10,000 or so students, hundreds of professors and staff members, and I'm walking on this campus with this huge belly and no one seemed to see me at the time. At the time I didn't really think about what support looked like and if I should have had it.
But now in my position as a college president, I think about those times where I had to take Lyric to Mrs. Green's office because I had a, oh my God, a Civil War class on Wednesdays from 6:00 to 10:00 PM but Dr. Jim Jones taught it. He made it a very good class, but still, what do I do with my kid at that time? Or even when you look at social media and you see clips of that one professor that's holding the baby and he or she is at the chalkboard and people are like applauding, "Yay, yay, yay. Look at that professor seeing that there was a need there."
But I think that's an issue because if the professor's got to hold that baby in the class, where are the supports from the college standpoint where there's drop in care or something to support those students? Some of the things that I've really focused on as a community college president are creating those spaces for students.
One of the first things I did when I was at my last previous institution in Washington, we opened up new breastfeeding locations around the campus, because the one that was there was in this really dark cold closet off in a building that no one could find. Then my husband came with my little one who was nine months or 10 months at the time, and he said, "I had to take Imani back to the car and change her diaper because there weren't diaper changing tables in the men's restrooms."
I said, "All right, effective immediately I want y'all to put diaper changing stations in every male/female, all gender restrooms or in my current institution we put in new student parent study space in our library. Y'all, let me tell you, it took me 10 months to birth that baby. Typically, it takes nine months, but it took me 10 months to birth the baby of actually opening a student parent study space in a library with traditional librarians who didn't believe that, one, children are allowed in a library, and two, the children could eat in a library. That was quite the issue.
But I think from a national perspective in higher education, we still have a long way to go. I'm not trying to draw this dreary picture, but there's also some things that we can be thankful for. We need to continue to push and elevate these stories as we continue. Thanks for that David.
Croom: Michaela, I want to follow up with you before we move on to the next question to Yolanda. You talked about your student parent story in our podcast, but you also talked about in that podcast how you utilized your story to and the story of so many other parents in Oregon, where you're from, to move legislation and get Oregon to be one of the first states in the country to collect student parent data. Would you mind sharing a little bit more around that approach and why you were so strategic about doing that?
Martin: I didn't feel brave or strategic. I'm just going to say I'm just not anything in this, right? I really had a really simple question. I just wanted to know how many student parents there were on campus, and I felt like that was just super fundamental information to have. When I was trying to advocate for other things on campus, folks were like, "Well, we don't know how many people that would help or how many... We don't know things."
I was like, "Then somebody should find out." I really just got stuck on that. I think the strategic approach I took in making it very simple was, this is a very simple question, "How many student parents there are in Oregon and on my campus?" I think that that was really what pushed it forward, was the simplicity of it and that there was this assumption often in the capital in general that we already had this information, because sometimes we quote numbers that are survey data or national data, but that doesn't tell me how many are on my campus.
Breaking that down and really diving deeper into what the data we did have included, and that was awesome, but that we also had a more in-depth need for the really basic information. When the podcast came out, I had not yet passed that bill. I'm really, really excited to be able to come to this follow-up and say that we passed the student parent data collection.
Fantastic. Yeah, very simple. That's being implemented right now. I still don't know how many student parents there are on my campus for the record, still waiting. Maybe there'll be another one, give me another year or two and that day it'll start coming in, but it is being implemented at colleges right now across the state and we should start having that information.
Willis: Yolanda, let's switch to you. One of the strengths of student parents is that they play so many roles, not just as learners but also as teachers and caregivers. Something that stuck out to me in your episode of the podcast is how you carry on your mother's teachings and the things that she taught you and particularly about how to care for those around you.
The examples of you sitting in the car and you're in Brownsville, Brooklyn, your mom says, "Take run this up to the apartment whatever," or, "Go and do this and do that." How often, excuse me, how when you were in Shock boot camp in Bedford Hills prison, you helped your sisters out who were also going through it and you had this song and these steps and you all kind of supported each other. Then how you also took care of your mother when she got sick and prioritizing her needs and juggling that with being a student, being a parent yourself, also having a significant other.
Then you're also a reverend on top of that, and then you're an actress on top of all of that, which I just think is so critical and amazing. One of the things that I thought about listening to your podcast is just that verse, that bible verse, since you're a reverend and it says, "Train up a child on the way they should go and when they get old, they will not depart from it." Just how your story encapsulates just the natural progression of being a child going into your teen years trying to find your own way and then even in your story, how you say, but I don't regret anything, because I have to have had this journey to get to where I am today.
If you could just with all of that context, talk to us about how you live out the mission to care for others, the way your mother showed you. Previously at the New York City Housing Authority and right now in your position in the New York City Mayor's office and as a parent advisor with Ascend. How did being a student parent prime you for this role?
Johnson-Peterkin:
Wow, that's amazing. I do believe that the journey started in one of the worst areas of Brooklyn, where nobody wants to live in East New York, in Brooklyn and Brownsville. I think being in that community where we were, my mom constantly helped people in the community and we took care of the sick, the ill, the up the down.
I think that's where it started. I think life just started to open after that and then going and becoming a student parent. I didn't even know what a student parent was until I came here. I was like, you just go to school because you have to, right? Because if you don't, you won't make any money. But I think even in that, struggling and my mom getting sick and people in the community and I'm in a church and everybody's doing for everyone, that's what I thought you're supposed to do. That's what you grow up to do.
But then I started to realize that I pay very close attention to others, very, very close attention. I can see. If you're not feeling well, I don't know why, but I can see if you're hurt. I can watch you if you cry. I cry all the time. But I think it was innate because my mother was the person who did that and so many others in my community.
But what I do remember most is that coming to Ascend and understanding that I did something, I did something that so many other mothers and fathers are doing. Also, realizing that when I woke my child up at night and took him from my mom's house in the middle of the night through the rain and the cold, he was little and I was like, "Come on, we got to go home." I didn't realize the trauma.
You start to learn and you want to do that different for these young people that are coming now, you want to tell people, "We don't have to do it that way. We can have childcare and we can fight because that's what I was born and bred to do." I think someone said earlier, I think that it was built and poured in because that was what I was supposed to be doing.
If you don't know, you will know that I've done some things that I'm not so proud of in my past, and I was a student parent, and I have a son who I don't want his children to have to go through the things that I had to go through. I think pouring into my community and pouring into my cohorts and pouring into Ascend and pouring into the biggest housing development in New York City, I have to do it, because I have to make sure that somebody else don't have to do what I did in order to get where I got.
Willis: I'm proud of you. Yeah. Thank you. That's wonderful. I'm going to add onto that. Is it Keith? I said that right Keith, the part where he said, you better get on Yolanda's train. I know I'm on it, or else she's going to leave you. You can hear that in your passion and how you take care of others. Thank you for that.
Croom: Yolanda, I have a question. Something that you do in your day-to-day is think about how to help those who are just as involved, formerly incarcerated, gain access to public housing. Something that is innately important in the work as student parents is, "Yes, you work and get the degree, but it doesn't necessarily mean you're going to get a job immediately, or have access to housing, or childcare, or other supports. We would love for you to maybe expound upon a little bit around how you, in your day-to-day and the work that you do help individuals gain access to these important supports.
Johnson-Peterkin
There's policies across the United States around public housing and if you've done something, if you've done a crime, right? Can't in some public housing, they make their own policy where you can't move back in if you've done something because it's federal money. You shouldn't be able to have any access. That's called the Thurmond Law if you'd like to look up that Thurmond Law. But it's a policy, it's not law.
I saw Michaela in the airport and I broke it down for her and she was helping me. Also, it's something that we have to understand. One of the things that I thought was important, and I didn't know if it was important, but I thought that it was important, the foundation of housing, whether you've done something you're not so proud of or whether you want to or you need to have a place to live.
I had an opportunity to help people move back in with their family and public housing and we would screen the person, make the community feel well about themselves. But you guys need to know that people who did time in prison, they don't want to go back to prison. The majority of them, people who unfortunately may be addicted to substances, may have some other struggles in staying free, but those who did 15, 20 and things such as that, we already know that they have outed people who unfortunately did sexual crimes, but that's another bucket. But the rest of the individuals could live anywhere they want to and they probably won't go back to prison.
But we as a community are afraid because we see it on TV. we had an opportunity to do it. I get excited about this. We had two when I started, they had like six, and then we got 207 people to move back with their family in an existing apartment.
But it gets better. That's why I said get low and do the work. It gets better because even I, the social worker, did not know, because they had to teach me that I was housing, I was no longer the social worker I was housing and the people just moved in. But we realized that out of that 207, only five people in seven years, five got in trouble again and none of them were violent, none of them.
We realized in the work, it catapulted me to a grand old person. I got all kinds of stuff and awards there. It's on the federal website, the federal government recognizes it and stuff like that. But just so you know, David, so now I am the boss of that program. Now I move to the mayor's office, and I know it's a little difficult in New York right now, but the bottom line is that we have an opportunity to change student parents, because I was a student, I know what it feels like.
Not only a student, but somebody who has done something that I'm not proud of, and somebody who did not make a lot of money, did not live in a community where it was easy to live and it's still not easy to live. I was able to carve out what I could for somebody else, and that's important. Now it's no more just moving in with Michaela. She let me live with her, but now we're carving out an opportunity to make sure people have their own places and spaces to live.
Willis: Yeah. You're so cool. You're the best.
Croom: I'm like, where's my organ? Anyway, black church, y'all. I want to move on to Ariel, because something that we talk about in this work, so significant numbers of student parents are first generation, also not as many, but an important population of fathers in this work as well.
Something that you belong in these categories. You're first generation American, Ariel, you were first in your family to go to college and you're a father of two. In your podcast episode, you talk about the realization that as your family grew, you needed to take a step back from working jobs that weren't paying you enough, that diving back into your education, as you mentioned, you went back to your education I believe in 2014 you said, that's when you went back to Northern Virginia Community College with your partner at the time.
Now as you mentioned, you are a graduate of George Mason University. Interesting to know how did that decision to leave low wage work and deciding to go back to school change the trajectory of your life? How would you coach a current student father that was in front of you today around that decision?
Ventura-Lazo: Well, I can honestly say that it changed the trajectory of my life magnificently. Obviously, making that decision was probably one of the hardest things I had to do. I only say that because coming from the student father side, specifically, coming from the male perspective side specifically, you really have some questions and some self-reflection that you really have to do.
One of those thoughts are how long is this going to take me? Is it possible? Where's my roadmap? If I do commit to this, how am I going to bring the food to the table? How's it going to be possible to balance all these roles, I guess a provider and as a parent, and what will it do, I guess to my psyche as a father, as a man to provide in a household? But I can't at the moment because I have to rely on family services to get through just to make it possible to go to school.
A lot of the times I was met with a lot of pushback from caseworkers, just because the specific ones that I was, I guess faced with would categorize me just like a statistic. They would actually encourage me to get a higher paying job a little bit more just to get them off, just to get me off their caseload. No long-term plan aside from that.
But I'm glad I made the decision to go back. I'm glad it was possible. Obviously, we all know in this room it's not easy. School in general is not easy. But then being a parent, and then I guess what I can speak to is being a father, you got to think of all these psychological things behind it on how you're going to provide for your family while you risk possibly the thought of wasting time if you're going to even get through it.
It made a huge difference, obviously. I was able to ingrain within my son, within my daughter, that education is important. But on top of that, perseverance and just really being resilient to push through and it pays off if you just stick to it. That's one of the things that I've recently learned and I've heard it my whole life, but if you stick to it will pay off. Sometimes it does take 10 years to get that one year that pays off, ultimately.
Croom: You did it.
Willis: Yes.
Croom: One of the organizations serving student parents that we highlight in the podcast and we talk about often in our work is Generation Hope. We know that you're a part of that, Ariel. For those who are listening to the podcast Generation Hope is a DC based nonprofit and an Ascend Network partner that provides scholarships, mentorship, and early childhood services to young parents who are in college.
It's also featured in one of our episodes around mental health and features the founder, Nicole Lynn Lewis. Like Ascend, Generation Hope promotes a two-generation models, those solutions policy programs serving both children and adults in their lives simultaneously. Actually, yeah, next question is for Daria. Daria, you want to ask this question?
Willis: Ariel, given the context that David has laid out, how did this two gen approach and what he's explained here play out in your experience and how does a two generation approach inform the work that you do today?
Ventura-Lazo: Well, the two generation approach, I just want to say that I've been fortunate enough to be surrounded by a community of organizations and people who care to make change and create those waves. I've really actually benefited from those two generation approaches when speaking about my children.
I just was honored. I think about it all the time that when I went to Nova while I was getting my associates, they also had a program there as well too, that was really supportive of student parents and they were really doing their thing at the time. I had Generation Hope, I had that program, which was called the Adult Career Pathways Program, which was a holistic advising office for non-traditional students, which student parents kind of fell in a bucket in. I would bring my three, four-year-old son to campus several times. He went to class, to campus events. Just even one time actually he came, it was a partnership with the college that I was actually a work study of it by the way, Northern Northern Virginia Community College. I was a student there and also a work study at the time, and they had a partnership with the local daycare providers.
My son was at one of the daycares that actually came to the college to visit. I was obviously the one to lead his session in his class to show him around campus and just really teach him and his class and his friends that college can be exciting, that college is an option for you. Many of those kids, probably from maybe disadvantaged backgrounds, probably have never seen or been on step foot on a college campus.
That was my son and that was me growing up as well too. Being a first generation American, my mother wished she could have had the opportunity to attend school here. She couldn't. She had to work three, four or five jobs and just provide for her children and with no resources or lack thereof. I know she wishes she could have done more for me to show me, "Hey, this is how you do it." I'm very blessed to have been involved in a lot of these dual generation initiatives and to be able to teach my children the importance of education. Yeah, it is made a really big difference. Daria?
Willis: Excellent. Excellent. Yolanda or Michaela, would you like to add to that?
Johnson-Peterkin:
I just think that having an opportunity to even go back to we are powerful within our own right, right? In our communities, our families, our work, our children, Ascend, other places, the actual college, even for you Daria, to have Ms. Green. There's a lot of Ms. Greens in the world, but to be able to teach someone how they should treat us and shift environments to have that kind of power, sometimes it's heavy.
I heard a lot of stories as I have been sitting here for a couple of years. We went through Covid, we've done so much. But to be able to say that I can escort my son on campus and know that I did that, right, we've done a lot of work. We've accomplished much. Sure there's much more to accomplish. But I think pressing and pushing and even when I wanted to give up in school and having a professor say, "That's not an option," right? That's not an option. people understand even if they don't have children, what it means. I think we've done a lot. We've done a lot and we still will continue to kick in the door.
Willis: Michaela.
Martin: When you were speaking about bringing kids on campus, all I have is jokes right now. I'm sorry, y'all are saying great things. My son was disappointed when I was graduating from my bachelor's, because they had free onsite childcare called Little Village and he was obsessed. He loved it. We got to ride the little beaver bus shuttle to take him to childcare. When I was graduating, he was like, "So this means I'm no longer going my program." He was like, "Why is this a good thing? Why is everyone so excited we're having a party? None of this sounds great." He loves college.
Willis: Exactly.
Martin: I hope that sticks. I hope he goes.
Ventura-Lazo: I love that story. To wrap this up, I want to go around to the panel and we love to talk about, and thanks to Janine for coining this about our dreams and what student parents dream. What is your dream for student parents and 2023? We'll put it to a calendar year around it and maybe we'll say 2024 even too, since '23 is almost over.
Martin: Three months.
Ventura-Lazo: In the coming year, what is your dream for student parents and what can we all do to support the dream being closer to reality? I want to start with Daria first.
Willis: That student parents are seen just like our veteran students are on campuses, that they're supported in the same ways that other programs get federal recognition for. They're seen, that they're heard, they're valued, they have the resources and support they need, and that they're no longer invisible.
Croom: We'll go to Yolanda next.
Johnson-Peterkin
I want to have a conversation about what happens when you think you have a little bit of ability to shift and you need to understand how to do that. I want to be able to have a space where I called it an executive level two, because I don't really need executive level. I've done that. But the next level I need to understand it. How do I make those shifts, Sarah?
I know that I can do it now. I have the power, I have somebody's ear, even though don't talk about my man. But the bottom line is how do I hone in on that and make it a thing and opening the pathway for other student parents?
Croom: Thank you. Ariel, what's your dream for the student parents for the coming year?
Ventura-Lazo: I'm not trying to be biased, but I'm trying to get more fathers in college. I am trying to bring, I think that one of the shocking stats that I learned in the recent years is the fatherhood thing. I'm glad I didn't know earlier, because it probably would've played on that same psyche of like, "Oh man, I'm not going to do this," but out of those One in Five parents in college, we get that number that's about roughly what 30% of that are fathers.
You break that down into the 1 million rough estimate of fathers in college and undergrad and then you start looking at the start digging deeper into those surface layers. You see that Black and Hispanic Latino students have a 70% fail rate of dropping out. That's insane. I learned that I think about maybe last year or something. It's disappointing. I want to help create change in that field. That's my dream for student parents.
Croom: Michaela.
Martin: I still want to talk about childcare. That's really why I went into advocacy for, and I'm really excited I get to do that in my new current role. But I also think that sometimes on campuses, we're often focused about on campus childcare, which are super important. But there's also so many other opportunities to talk about community integration with higher education when it comes to student parents.
You go to college and then you have your whole rest of your life off of campus. I would really like to see more conversations about kindergarten readiness within student parents and making sure that our kids are as ready and being as successful as we are. That's my one-year goal is to integrate those [inaudible 00:36:44].
Willis: Yes.
Martin: Now you.
Croom: Oh me? No. Oh my bad.
Willis: I was just thinking, I'm just caught up in the drop the mics that have been happening. How about you, David? Answer your own question my of what you see in the next year.
Croom: That's my question. Well, I would say two dreams, I guess. Well, one to me is I want more individuals with lived experience all up in this space. I will say that the leaders who I've interacted with, many of whom have lived experience either like myself as a son of a student parent, or having been a student parent themselves, they get it. They're willing to do everything that's necessary in order to make the change in this work. That's one.
I would say a more practical one for me in the coming calendar year is to really make a play around state policy. We've seen so much work happening in states across the country around student parents and development supports and two generation models. I would love to continue seeding that work throughout the space. Those are my dreams.
Willis: Wonderful.
Croom: Well again, thank you to this amazing panel, Daria and Ariel, Yolanda, Michaela, David Croom. Thank you very much. Cheers.
CITATION:
Croom David. Host. “LIVE Episode: "1 in 5" at the Ascend's Parent Advisor Convening” 1 in 5 Podcast, Ascend at Aspen Institute, October 17, 2023. Ascend.AspenInstitute.org.