Drug abuse, racial assault, minor sexualization, poverty, homelessness, and foster care. These are all things I had to face growing up where I came from. Before I get into the nitty gritty, I'd like to formally introduce myself. My name is Itali Jones, I am a 19 year old single, black mother who is currently trying to pursue a career as a Pharmacist. It was a long journey to get to where I am now. I started off facing a battle between life in and out of foster care due to both of my parents being incarcerate for major drug charges. In foster care, I was met with a hard introduction to just how badly black women and girls are treated. I live in a small, southern city filled with many bigot people. I never really got to experience just how hard we had it until I was being picked on at the homes, being called every racial slur in the book. Some were even comical to me due to how much you really had to hate someone to even come up with the words they said. It didn't help that I had struck puberty in fifth grade and was built with a so called ''womanly'' figure. I was huge to them, but I was being shown attention by way older men. It was hard feeling as if I didn't fit in with them so I turned to older crowds. I started developing a drinking and drug problem by the 7th grade. I saw how skinny my mother got while battling addiction, so I felt like it would help with my weight and take the pain away. By the time I hit 10th grade, I had slowed down on my drug problem. I was still abusing pills, but it was far less then before. I was taken in by my aunt, but she lost her home. I was hopping from house to house up until a few weeks ago when I was blessed to get my first apartment. I had hopped homes with people I knew, even traveling all the way to Virginia just to have a place to stay. My small town was already struggling with deep housing and was on the poorer side of cities. I was in such a stressful situation. By then I had an almost one year old, and was struggling with ends meat after leaving my abusive babyfather. I was so hopeless. Although I am still struggling financially, after being accepted to my current school, getting clean, finding a home for me and my daughter, I was able to map out what journey I wanted to take. I want to use my history of drug abuse to pursue my Pharm D so I can help others like me. My hometown is no stranger to drugs, and almost everyone I know is struggling with issues like mine. I want to create drug awareness programs, and try to make natural, all vegan drugs to prescribe to my future patients instead of the harsh drugs that many I know are being hooked on. I want to create a place where people can get real help, and feel cared for beyond just getting a paycheck. I want to use everything I've went through to help fund more programs and arenas for people to get clean, and to help them thrive. I want black women like me to be looked at as more than just junkies and teen mothers. But as powerful women who can overcome anything no matter what stands in our way. For us and our kids!

Drug abuse, racial assault, minor sexualization, poverty, homelessness, and foster care. These are all things I had to face growing up where I came from. Before I get into the nitty gritty, I'd like to formally introduce myself. My name is Itali Jones, I am a 19 year old single, black mother who is currently trying to pursue a career as a Pharmacist. It was a long journey to get to where I am now. I started off facing a battle between life in and out of foster care due to both of my parents being incarcerate for major drug charges. In foster care, I was met with a hard introduction to just how badly black women and girls are treated. I live in a small, southern city filled with many bigot people. I never really got to experience just how hard we had it until I was being picked on at the homes, being called every racial slur in the book. Some were even comical to me due to how much you really had to hate someone to even come up with the words they said. It didn't help that I had struck puberty in fifth grade and was built with a so called ''womanly'' figure. I was huge to them, but I was being shown attention by way older men. It was hard feeling as if I didn't fit in with them so I turned to older crowds. I started developing a drinking and drug problem by the 7th grade. I saw how skinny my mother got while battling addiction, so I felt like it would help with my weight and take the pain away. By the time I hit 10th grade, I had slowed down on my drug problem. I was still abusing pills, but it was far less then before. I was taken in by my aunt, but she lost her home. I was hopping from house to house up until a few weeks ago when I was blessed to get my first apartment. I had hopped homes with people I knew, even traveling all the way to Virginia just to have a place to stay. My small town was already struggling with deep housing and was on the poorer side of cities. I was in such a stressful situation. By then I had an almost one year old, and was struggling with ends meat after leaving my abusive babyfather. I was so hopeless. After being accepted to my current school, getting clean, finding a home for me and my daughter, I was able to map out what journey I wanted to take. I want to use my history of drug abuse to pursue my Pharm D so I can help others like me. My hometown is no stranger to drugs, and almost everyone I know is struggling with issues like mine. I want to create drug awareness programs, and try to make natural, all vegan drugs to prescribe to my future patients instead of the harsh drugs that many I know are being hooked on. I want to create a place where people can get real help, and feel cared for beyond just getting a paycheck. I want to use everything I've went through to help fund more programs and arenas for people to get clean, and to help them thrive. I want black women like me to be looked at as more than just junkies and teen mothers. But as powerful women who can overcome anything no matter what stands in our way. For us and our kids!

I want to start off by introducing myself to whom this may concern. I am Itali Jones. I am a nineteen year old, single mother of one. I am now currently enrolled at PSC, located in Florida. I am currently choosing Pharmacy as my area of study. I chose to become a Pharmacist because of my families long history of drug abuse. Many people in my immediate family, such as mother and father, and myself have had addictions to prescription drugs. My parents addiction and sale of these substances have unfortunately led them to be incarcerated. After losing my parents to the system at the age of eleven, I soon became submersed in the life of using drugs to help cope. I was fortunately able to get off of them when I found out I was pregnant with my only child, but the long term affects motivated me to want to work in that field professionally, and legally. I believe that many drug addictions, at least the ones I have encountered around me, have started off as a simple prescription that was given for pain. Many of my loved ones were involved in car accidents, surgeries, or other harsh intrusions to the natural state of their body that was cared for with a simple paper that ordered them things such as Percocet, Lortabs, Xanax, etc. Seeing how quickly this can turn someone's life around for the worst made me feel as if I could use my PharmD degree to create natural medicines. One's that have little to no side affects whenever my patients would come off of them. One that they can use as a holistic approach to recovery. It is no secret that drugs that are prescribed can cause long term damage, and a reliance on them. Holistic medicines with natural herbs would be the safer alternative for people like me, and the ones who would eventually come into my pharmacy. The medical field is one that thrives off of money because of people being in need. Drugs that are being prescribed can cause worse long term affects which keeps these markets in business because they'll always have a patient to acre for. I would rather think about the money last, and the health of these people first because that is what's important. I want to change their quality of life and their way of thinking about the earth medicine we started healing ourselves with many years ago. We didn't have opioids years ago, and I want to use my area of study to bring back popularity to all things natural. Along with creating natural medicines, I want to use my knowledge of the Pharm industry to better help those who are currently going through drug addiction. I live in a primarily black town, and it hurts to see my friends, and other people I grew up with face these issues due to influence, family history, mental illness, and other adversities that we face in our small town. It is popular here for sure. I want to see my people get better. My people meaning other black people like me, and any other race all around the world. I want to create centers for those who are addicted so they have access to these natural medicines at a low cost, have education on their health, and have proper treatment to help get them off. I think its important that through keeping away from drugs we keep them motivated to understand just how badly it can affect them. I believe my degree would help start something revolutionary in the medical field. And this scholarship can help me get there.

I was introduced the to life in prison early on. By the age of three, my father had been incarcerated an sentenced to 10 years in prison. By the time I was seven, my mother started her long pattern of being in and out of jail. This pattern shortly ended after she was sentenced to thirty three years in jail in my seventh grade year. My family's history of being in and out of prison didn't start with them, and I realized it definitely wouldn't end when my brother was recently sentenced to life. There has been an immense amount of pressure on me to do well ever since my father had left. I am the youngest of six, and all my older siblings were deeply involved in the street life. My mother and father believed I was different because I spent more time inside the house reading than hanging out in our dangerous neighborhood. I have always carried the weight on my shoulders of being the one in our family who would write over the failures our last name has created. The incarceration of my loved ones not only deeply traumatized me, but made me want to push harder to prove to myself that I could be bigger than a statistic. I wanted to break the chain of not only incarceration, but of drop outs, welfare dependents, and drug addicts. The fear of having a story close to the ones in my family who were incarcerated pushed me to set high academical goals for myself as well as pursue my hobbies that would keep me out of the streets. I started working full time as soon as I was able to to help keep me occupied in my down time. I also started to get into my love for literature as well. Writing school award winning contests, and creating stories on an online platform for millions of readers to read. I took the examples that were handed to me and decided that I deserved better. I decided that I was in control. I pushed myself hard to make it through honor roll classes, that would eventually lead me to open the doors for AP classes during the school year and summer. This academic consistency and motivation has ended me up at graduation with acceptance to a PrePharmacy program at SWCC. Everyday that I make the right decisions, and stay on path to my goals I have set for myself, I am overcoming adversity. Not only the adversity that is written sourly into my blood, but the adversity I choose to rise from myself.

Substance abuse is something I am far too familiar with. I have a long history of addicts in my family, not only to pharmaceutical drugs, but to alcohol as well. Sadly, my grandmother passed away at my mother's ripe age of 13 to drug abuse. I also personally watched my mother struggle then overcome her own battle with prescription drugs. After being introduced to this in elementary school, I then spent most of my middle and high school years struggling with the abuse of drugs as well. Even though this is a sensitive topic for me, this history that runs so deeply in my family and my personal experience with the how dangerous addiction can be has fueled me to pursue a degree in Pharmacy. I started becoming more interested in majoring for this Doctoral Degree once I won my own battle with this world wide epidemic in 11th grade. Pharmacy is my passion because I want to learn the ins and outs of medicine along with their effects. I have never been too good at science, but while I attended high school, I decided to work hard to achieve excellent grades in my science cores to give me a better chance at what I would be taking on upon graduation. So, to reiterate the question of how I would personally use my degree to uplift other from underrepresented communities, I would like to use my Pharmaceutical education to help those affected by drug abuse world wide. It is no secret that this has been a war we as citizens have been fighting for decades. I would like to create an organization that not only brings more awareness, but also supports those who are fighting to win their own personal war on drugs. Everyone looks at drug addicts as the bottom of the totem pole when it comes to society. I have, in many cases, seen or heard people speak so vilely of these humans who I personally believe deserve a second chance just as any of us sober people would. The truth is, in my perspective, that these people need our help the most. They deserve respect and support through this turmoil that they are dealing with and through obtaining my degree in Pharmacy I believe I will be more educated on how to help them. I want to shed light on the ones that are trapped in this darkness, and support them through their journey to sobriety in the best way I can. By obtaining this award I can step closer to my that degree will further my education which will expand my financial ability to start my non-profit, free of cost community resource for this cause.