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Nahar speaks at national event
Christina Nahar looked in her pocket and found a nickel and two pennies. It was all the money she had in the world.
Seven cents to feed her two children. Seven cents to pay the bills. Seven cents to take on all of life’s challenges. A single mom, she lived a life full of fear and tears.
“There were so many nights I would cry,” Nahar said of those days in the late 1990s. “I cried a lot. I remember looking at my kids when they were little and feeling like a failure.”
Today, she is anything but a failure. More like an incredible success. A shining example of how Gateway Community Action Partnership can play a part in turning a life around. She is the embodiment of Gateway’s mission “to provide services that improve the quality of life and promote self-sufficiency.”
With services that promote self-sufficiency and an employment opportunity, Gateway played a significant role in changing a life that included homelessness and homeless shelters, extreme poverty, domestic abuse, thoughts of suicide, and days of cleaning her children’s clothes with a neighbor’s borrowed garden hose, tub and washboard.
Today, Nahar owns a home, is only months away from bachelor’s degree from Wilmington University, successfully manages her finances, provides for her children and has a good job working for a cardiologist.
“I would not be where I am today if not for Gateway,” said Nahar, who started with Gateway’s services with Women, Infants and Children (WIC) in 1997.
Just as important are the hopes and dreams she has for herself and her two children. Someday she wants to open a shelter for the homeless, for people like her who just need some care and direction. She is proud of her children’s plans for higher education and achievement. There were not a lot of hopes and dreams when she had just seven cents and seemingly nowhere to turn.
Nahar’s story is so compelling, she was selected to tell it before a Washington, DC audience of about 500 attending “The Shriver Report LIVE,” a full-day event held on Jan. 15 in conjunction with the release of the latest “Shriver Report: A Woman’s Nation Pushes Back from the Brink.” The Shriver Report sought women who have successfully escaped poverty and despair to speak at its event. Gateway nominated Nahar, and she was chosen as one of four speakers.
Nahar was nervous. The event was held at the Newseum, a museum of news history located between the White House and the United States Capitol. She knew the room was filled with accomplished journalists, elected leaders and other very important people such as Maria Shriver, the driving force behind The Shriver Report. Shriver is also an internationally renowned journalist and author and the daughter of Sargent Shriver, President Lyndon B. Johnson’s point man on the “War on Poverty” and an architect of Community Action Agencies.
But Nahar overcame her nervousness and did a remarkable job of conveying her decades-long struggle and path to success in the allotted, too-short, two minutes. She was showered with applause at the end of her story.
Nahar was grateful for the chance to relate her experiences in such a high profile forum because it presented the opportunity to inspire someone to follow her path and climb out of poverty and perceived hopelessness.
“It’s been a hard road for me, and when you walk this path, you feel like you are the only one who is going through it at the time,” said Nahar, 37, a Millville resident and 1994 graduate of Vineland High School. “I thought this would give me a chance to put my name out there and show people there are ways of getting out of whatever muck you are in. During that journey, you feel like it is never going to end and you will never get anywhere. A lot of doors are closed on you, and you just want to give up. You really do.”
But Nahar did not give up. Around the time she was down to her last seven cents, Nahar began to rebuild the foundation of her life slowly, brick by brick.
She sort of stumbled upon the administrative offices of Gateway Community Action Partnership in Bridgeton, known at the time as Tri-County Community Action Agency, and recalls thinking that she had to find out more about the agency and what it offered.
It offered a lot. She started with the Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) program, and soon availed herself of the services of Head Start for her children, a matched savings program that helped her save for a house and financial and homeownership counseling that led to establishing credit and homeownership. She was soon offered a job at Gateway (Tri-County) Head Start, took classes subsidized by Head Start to improve her position in the program and worked at Gateway/Tri-County for 10 years.
“We are very proud of Christina,” said Albert B. Kelly, Gateway’s President and CEO and founder. “She is proof that Community Action Agencies work and are vital to the community. We are pleased that Christina so eloquently described her experiences and the assistance she received from Gateway Community Action Partnership in such a high profile setting. She is an inspiration for anyone seeking to escape poverty. She is an inspiration for all of us.”
Nahar has advice for anyone in a similar situation seeking to escape poverty.
“It takes work; you have to work hard,” Nahar said. “It (self-sufficiency) doesn’t get thrown at you. You are not going to wake up one day and find that dust gets sprinkled over you and you are going to be living well. You have to work hard for it.”
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