Raising families
Charities’ Lake County program offers emotional, material support



By Michelle Martin
Staff writer

Lumba Kuanda-Dove knows why she has to succeed. She sees the four bright faces looking at her every day, from breakfast until bedtime.

“Now I have nothing,” Kuanda-Dove said in an interview at Catholic Charities’ Cardinal Bernardin Center in Waukegan. “I want to leave them with something.”

But Kuanda-Dove has more now than she did two years ago, when she entered Catholic Charities Family Self-Sufficiency Program. Then, she was just moving out of Samaritan House, the shelter she had gone to when she left a mentally abusive husband with three children and a fourth on the way.

While she was in the shelter, she got connected with Catholic Charities. As she prepared to move out, she became eligible for the Family Self-Sufficiency Program, which helps families become economically self-sufficient over a period of five years.

The program is open to families led by a single head-of-household—most often mothers, but sometimes fathers or grandparents—with at least one child under 18 and stable housing in Lake County. Last fiscal year, it helped 612 adults and children, said Laura Kuever, the program’s director.

The program will be honored Sept. 15 with a Family Strengthening Award from Catholic Charities USA. The $25,000 award will go to three programs in the United States from among 50 nominated by local Catholic Charities organizations. It is underwritten by the Annie E. Casey Foundation.

“Our three Family Strengthening Award winners give children what they need most—strong, capable and economically stable families,” said Father Larry Snyder, president of Catholic Charities USA.

When Kuanda-Dove entered the Family Self-Sufficiency Program in Waukegan, she had children ranging in age from 9 to newborn, no job and no family support. But Catholic Charities offered job training, counseling, assistance with needs such as emergency food supplies or gas money, and, what Kuanda-Dove said was more important than anything, a shoulder to lean on—and sometimes to cry on.

“I’m here all by myself,” she said. “I have no family here.”

When she left her husband, she took nothing—not even the kids’ clothes—and was coping with her oldest daughter’s ongoing medical needs after being treated at Children’s Hospital in Milwaukee for a brain tumor. Mabelle, now 11, is healthy; when asked, her biggest concern is being nervous about starting middle school this year.

But to keep the family moving forward, Kuanda-Dove rises by herself as early as 3:30 a.m. to say her prayers, eat something and dress before the children get up. She wakes them at 4:30, and all five are out the door to make it to the school bus company Kuanda-Dove works for by 6 a.m.

The three older children—Mabelle; Biondi, 8; and Abigaille, 4—board the buses that will eventually take them to their schools or preschools, and Kuanda-Dove takes 2-year-old Tabitha with her, along with any children of other bus drivers who need to be on her route.

By 9 a.m., Kuanda-Dove has finished her morning run, and she heads to College of Lake County, where Tabitha stays with a sitter while Kuanda-Dove attends nursing classes. Then she returns with Tabitha to drive the afternoon run, and everyone heads home from the bus company at about 4:30 to eat dinner, do homework and go to bed. “If you walk by my place, you would think no one lives there,” she said. “It is all closed up.”

But within three years, she hopes to have finished her nursing degree. Then, she hopes, she can get a better job and eventually buy a house. Meanwhile, she speaks to the children in her native French as well as English, and is teaching them some Spanish, a language she expects will come in handy when she gets a nursing job.

Not everyone in the Family Self-Sufficiency program does as well as Kuanda-Dove and her children, said Hanna Branaforte, a bilingual case manager. Some clients have a more difficult time finding motivation.

To help, the program offers monthly gatherings, some educational—how to change the oil in a car, for instance—and some fun, including an annual family picnic. All clients in the program get help setting up a budget.

They also get some nice surprises, Kuanda-Dove said, recalling her first Thanksgiving in the program. She didn’t know how she would provide a holiday dinner for her children, she said, until her caseworker called her and told her they had a basket for her.

“My table was full,” she said. “I never expected that. And they encourage me to go to school. I feel like I have somebody else around who cares.”