Another Christmas. The look of the empty tree adds to the somber mood of the morning. My siblings and I stood around the kerosene heater trying to stay warm as the temperature continued o drop. It felt like we were gonna freeze to death inside that old, run-down house. We were used to not having presents for Christmas, but this year we didn't have much food either. I almost felt like tiny tim from the movie "A Christmas Carol" I am Teanna Stubbs. I am a Senior at Mount View High School and live in Welch, WV. This past winter, I hosted a toy drive for local elementary-aged children. I hosted this toy drive because I grew up extremely poor. We often did not have food or new clothes, and sometimes went without water or power. The holidays were the hardest time of the year for my family. I was the second oldest of five kids, the oldest being my autistic brother, Tony. Because of the way my life was, I grew up way faster than I should have. I had to be mature and smart for the success and survival of my family and quickly found ways to make money for food and bills. When I was young, I was kind of the therapist for my siblings. They didn't often understand why things were the way they were and relied on me for guidance and support during our hardest times. Because of this, I developed a passion for psychology. I love learning how the brain works, especially the brains of children. I want to work with minority children like me who suffered abuse and neglect and were in the foster care system. I plan to major in Psychology at Marshall University with a focus on children and minor in social work. The life I lived growing up in Welch made me realize how desperately kids like me need a support system and I want to fight for those children since nobody fought for me. The world is extremely hard, especially for children who come from bad home situations. I want to lower the negative statistics associated with those children and provide them with the help they need. I want to change the state of West Virginia and be a resource for abused and neglected children all over this great state, starting in my hometown of Welch. This scholarship will help me make sure that happens. Thank you for your consideration.

The shrill cries of a baby echo down the hallway. At the end of the hall, my mother sat spreading two cans of potted meat on four slices of bread. She then folded them in half and handed each one to a dusty, hungry, black child. It was not much, but it was all we had. The food bank was closed today, and mom had spent her last three dollars on cans of cheap meat just to fill our empty bellies. Our father lay in his room, asleep in his bed surrounded by empty beer cans with the tv playing a college football game. The cable was scheduled to be turned off the next morning. I grew up in an old coal town in West Virginia called Welch. Nobody from Welch had a lot of money. In Welch, West Virginia, 510 out of 1.58k people—or 32.2% of the population—live below the poverty line. My family was among this unfortunate bunch to be the poorest of the poor. My mom worked as much as she could cleaning the houses of the elderly people who lived in town. My dad got SSI because of a “back injury” he got in his teens. We survived off the $50 a week, my mom would bring home from cleaning houses and a few food stamps. My dad would very often sell the food stamps that were in my mother's name. He would sell them for cash and then take that cash to buy alcohol, leaving my mother to handle her starving, cold children. My mother always tried to be strong for us, but she was tired, sad, and hungry. Often, she would give up her food to make sure we ate. My public school system took the initiative to make sure that kids like us ate. Every Friday, they would send us home with a small bag of food. The food in these bags was always two packs of ramen noodles, one can of Chef Boyardee ravioli or spaghetti, some Pop tarts, peanut butter crackers, applesauce and if we were lucky, a juice box or fruit snacks. It was humiliating to have this big cart full of bags wheeled around school and you called out of class to quickly grab one and shove it in your backpack. This way of growing up taught me how strong I really am. I never gave up on school and even though often I would wake up and go to sleep hungry, I still did all I could to provide for myself and my siblings. I want to make my family proud. I refuse to let my children grow up the same way I did and will do everything in my power to avoid it happening. My mother is my biggest inspiration for this. She was a strong, single woman providing for her four children and my father’s autistic son while he sat drunken and dazed on the bed or couch all day. She taught me that with all odds against you, you can still come out on top. We struggled a lot, but mom did her best. If we were cold, she would warm our bodies. If we were hungry, she would find a way to feed us, if we cried, she cried. I want to help kids who grew up like me mentally. I understand how the brain of an impoverished, neglected child works and want to do all I can to provide for children who experienced the same as me. Physical abuse and neglect can kill. I believe I can save lives.

Growing up as a black woman in rural Appalachia, pursuing an education was one of the most difficult things anyone could do. It was incredibly difficult to juggle family responsibilities, academic pressure to succeed, and mental health issues while simultaneously taking care of your family and serving as the second mother to your siblings. What effects did those events have on me that helped me decide what I wanted to do with my life and shaped who I am today? School was my haven. Up until my junior year of high school, I never had a problem with school. I detested the fact that everything I did throughout that year was entirely online. I missed going to class to learn, as well as missing my classmates and teachers. I had a lot of academic issues that year because of Covid, which I believe hurt my reputation as a student. I failed Spanish that year because I had to learn it entirely online, and since I have never been good at math, my scores there were not any better. I believed that as a student, I had failed miserably in every way. I am one of six kids, the second oldest. Due to my older brother's autism, I was left in charge of everything. My mother worked a lot and spent little time at home. Dad had a severe alcohol problem. He would blow up on everyone after drinking, then pass out and sleep all day. That required me to provide for my siblings in every way, including providing food. In addition to encouraging everyone to complete their homework and ensure that they had clean clothes to wear to school the next day, I had to see to it that my brother took his medication on time. I was ten years old when I started doing all of this, and I am still doing it today—just not nearly as much as I used to, since our father is no longer our primary caregiver. Around sixth grade, my mental health started to decline. I had an eating disorder, and every smile seemed forced. I was suicidal. That, in my opinion, was the only route to peace. Bullying was a significant factor in this. I was treated like a plague since everyone knew I was poor. Additionally, my father would publicly embarrass all of us, which did not improve my situation. The kids at school made me want to die. The bullying was too much for me to handle. I became fascinated with psychology during all of this. It was quite fascinating to me to learn about the human brain and how it functions. I wanted to learn as much as I could about it. What caught my attention the most was child psychology. In order to understand how children who experienced comparable upbringing to mine develop their brains in response to their surroundings, I want to research and study these kids. As someone who grew up without access to mental health resources, I also want to do my best to help kids like me. To conclude, I want to study clinical psychology because I want to work with children just like me. I want to help children who were parents without biological children, children who were bullied and struggled with mental health, children who could not bear eating and hated their weight. Every shattered child needs a lot more love than they have received, and I want to be a resource for them. I want to make a difference in the world.

My Mother grew up a biracial woman in a completely white family. She has to fight to prove her worth every single day. Her father was a black man who was the pastor at a local church, but she did not meet him until she was 19 years old because he never wanted to step up and be a father. My mom proved from the start that she never needed a man to dictate her capabilities and worth. She got pregnant with me at 17, by my father who was 39 years old at the time. I was born on her 18th birthday at 12:04 pm. My mom didn't want me to grow up in a situation similar to hers so she would work 12+ hours a day to try and provide for my siblings and I. She did her best but it wasn't enough with an alcoholic father spending all the money on substance abuse. Ive always had a great relationship with my mother, because not only was I her first born daughter, I was her best friend. I was the person who wiped her tears and helped her clean the house and tutor my siblings when she was too tired to move. I was her reason for living, and she was mine. Although my mother is a biracial woman raised in an all white family and didn't know much about African American culture, she did as best as she could to help me embrace and love my blackness. She told me my darker skin was gorgeous and my 4C texture hair was the most beautiful hair she had ever seen. She learned how to take care of my hair and skin type which was very different from hers and taught me to love myself My mom never got to go to college. From the age of 17, she was a mother raising my dad's first son plus me, and eventually having 3 more children. Because she never got to further her education and better her life, she had always encouraged me to do it. With her help, I grew up considered a "Gifted Child". I was enrolled in Honors programs, winning multiple academic awards and contests, and ending up in newspapers. She constantly tells me how proud she is that I'm continuing to try and better my life so I won't have to live a life similar to hers and be another statistic. She's afraid for me to graduate and start college in 2023, because no mother wants their little girl to grow up, but she knows I'm going to do great things and I cant wait to show her and the world what I'm capable of. I vow to make my mother as proud of me as she can possibly be.

I grew up in Welch, West Virginia. It was once a booming city, but is now more of a poverty struck ghost town. My father is a raging alcoholic and was very abusive towards my mother. my four siblings and me. I was already set for failure at birth since I am an obese, poor, black woman living in such a rural area. I battled with abuse at home, bullying at school, and racism everywhere I went. At one point, I had someone call my home phone and threaten to kill me, just because I was overweight and poor. When I was younger, I slept on the floor with a small blanket or hoodie. We couldn't afford a bed, so my younger siblings slept on the couch while me and my older brother slept on the floor. Food was never guaranteed, and we often went days or weeks with barely anything edible in the house because my dad would spend all his money on alcohol and marijuana I started showing signs of disordered eating very early in life, because I was always told I'd only be pretty if I was skinny. Ive dealt with everything from Binge Eating Disorder to Anorexia, and never got the treatment I needed. Because I'm anemic and wasn't eating correctly, I'd get frequent headaches and my weight would fluctuate a lot. It always felt like people were judging me. Whispering made me worry I was being talked about, food made me uncomfortable, eating in front of others scared me. I still struggle with my relationship with food, but I'm actively in the process of fixing it. Now I'm eating correctly and trying to not over exercise, while just enjoying the body I've been given At home, my dad would threaten me, attack me, and try to have me arrested often in drunken fits. He said he hated me and was disgusted to call me his daughter. Because of this, I developed depression and anxiety. When I was about 14, I heavily considered suicide. I'd always been told its a quitters way out, but in that moment I felt like a quitter. I was tired of not being happy and treated like the scum of the earth by everyone I interacted with and just wanted to stop feeling the constant pain. I struggled with self harm and my grades were starting to drop. I was always cold and hungry and nobody would ever listen to me. Not even CPS, who was making at least 12 trips to my house yearly. I felt like nobody loved me. I felt like nobody cared that I was being abused and struggling and crying out for help. I never got the help I needed. I was lucky enough for my mother to finally get full custody of me and my siblings in May of 2021, and we've finally started to find our peace. There are occasional problems because of trauma my siblings and I have, but at least we're safe. I want to go to college to become a child and adolescent psychologist. I want to help children, because I never was able to get the help I needed. Children NEED mental health counseling and education, especially those who come from situations just like mine. No child deserves to go unheard and feel unloved, and I want to make it my duty to help as many children as I can in my home state. As a child of a failed system, I feel it is my job to help and protect future children of the same failed system, until the system itself is fixed. I hope to do that with assistance from your scholarship, and I want to gladly thank you for the opportunity.