Success Stories
Three generations benefit from women's transition program
Story by Chris Cunningham
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| Three women succeed in college and life with support from the Transitions to Success program at Lane Community College. Seated: Lorna Zimmerman. Standing, from left: Jennifer Cromwell and Tamera Zimmerman. |
Three generations of women are benefiting from participation in Lane's Transitions to Success, a program that helps displaced homemakers, single parents, and other women in flux become economically self-sufficient through access to education, training, and employment.
Sixty-seven-year-old Lorna Zimmerman enrolled in Transitions in 1997, after her husband of 37 years died. "I was on my own. I needed to find out who I was."
Suffering from arthritis, Lorna knew she couldn't return to waitressing work, but didn't know what other options she had.
Then she learned about the Transitions program, which offers a two-course core curricula: "Life Transitions" helps women to explore new life directions and improve self-image, while "Career and Life Planning" uses classroom discussions and tests to help women examine their interests, skills and personality styles.
The program immediately made Lorna feel she was deserving, that she had, in her own words, "something worth bringing out."
That meant taking computer classes to augment her typing skills, a choice that ultimately led to employment with a local storage company, where she worked until retirement.
Lorna's granddaughter, 26-year-old Jennifer Cromwell, followed suit, enrolling in the Transitions 1 class in 2007.
Jennifer says class discussions were especially helpful because many of the students shared similar difficulties.
And a journal-keeping project was particularly meaningful because instructor Linda Gonzalves' provided each person with written feedback that was supportive and non-threatening, she says.
Jennifer, a mother of two, is now a human service major at Lane, preparing for a career in family intervention and drug abuse prevention.
Her aunt, 49-year-old Tamera Zimmerman, had been a stay-at-home mom for 26 years before she enrolled in Transitions' core classes in 2008. "(Transitions) is giving me the courage to major in English or journalism, and pursue a writing career."
Tamera says, "The program affirmed a lot of things that I had already figured out, (and) put me in the direction I always wanted to go."
Published by Lane Community College Marketing and Public Relations, February 2008. Photo by Joan Aschim, Marketing and Public Relations.
