Christen Jacobs

My name is Christen Jacobs, and I'm from Avondale. I'm choosing to share this as my story because in this picture, you'll see about 15 of us grouped together holding up our certificates of completion.

This moment represented healing and transformation for me because as a parent, I've been able to glean from other people, even though I'm helping to lead the group. It's been able to actually teach me how to be a better parent. And it also just gave us gave me more confidence that we can actually accomplish what we set out to do. Sometimes when you're putting on a program, no matter what the demographic is, parents, kids or anybody, it's hard to actually get to the finish line. And the fact that we're holding up our little completion certificates really helps me see, like, hey, we can we can actually get this done.

This was the very first parent network group that started in 2024 at Avondale Library. And so one of the parents, you can see him in the front smiling there. Christopher is a young father in the community, and he just had been stating that he needed support. He asked the librarian if there was anything that we could do, and we were able to mobilize and get a group together— because parents, caregivers, grandmas, grandpas, concerned aunts and uncles—there's a lot for us to learn from each other, no matter what stage you're at in parenting.

Click below to hear Christen share the story of this photograph and the Avondale community: