Nuvia C. received a disconnect notice from Seattle City Light while her daughters were home from school on Winter Break. Nuvia, whose ten and six year old daughters are in elementary school, worried how her children would spend their much anticipated days off without electricity and heat. “I can’t afford to send my girls to after-school activities and they spend the majority of their afternoons and weekends at home playing together,” she says.
Nuvia, who immigrated to Seattle from Mexico almost a decade ago, holds two jobs as a caregiver to the elderly to support her young family as a single parent. In addition to her daughters, she has a rambunctious two-year old son. Nuvia has struggled to find permanent work, and her current hours are inconsistent. Some weeks, she is only asked to work a couple of hours, and a good portion of her paychecks go to cover her transportation costs, as she often has to drive over an hour to get to her patients’ houses.
Nuvia has relied on Byrd Barr Place’s Energy Assistance Program in the past to help pay her electric and gas bills, and she was relieved to learn that she received $250 through the Bridge the Gap program so her children would have a warm house to come home to from school. She hopes that this new year will bring steady work and will enable her to enroll her daughters in after-school ballet class.
