My name is Samuel Bails Stewart, I am going into my sophomore year of college, I am currently attending the University of Illinois Chicago (UIC) where I'll be pursuing my bachelor's in real estate.

My childhood came from normal suburban middle class living until the pandemic where conflict start becoming a consistent factor in life for my household. These conflicts with consistent arguments that would sometimes lead to physical altercations including both parents and multiple siblings. This went on until 2023 where it got to a boiling point, and we did evaluations of people involved in these arguments and during these evaluations we found out my father was diagnosed with Dementia and Alzheimer's. This shifted my mother's focus to taking care of him while led to the downfall of our family businesses where we lost almost 10 properties included our house.

We fought hard to negotiate and reacquire our house for 3 months but wasn't able to which led us to getting evicted from our home in September 2024 and having to move to a hotel. In late 2024 after the eviction my father's health deteriorated which led him to be hard to handle and take care alongside of doing our own responsibilities, and as he got worse the worst it was to take care of him until it got so bad he was hospitalized and he passed in late December of 2024.

This hurt not only our family but the community and it was a hard time recovering after his death. These 2 tragedies hurt me especially and cause my senior year to feel like hell on earth even with those tragedies I still graduated high school with a 3.0 GPA and enroll into UIC.

Things were going well until my bill of my student account came in and I found out I owed the school over $7,000 for enrolling into the fall semester and living in the dorm. This hit hard and I desperately scrambled and searched for ways to pay this bill, lucky one of my advisors found 2 scholarships to pay the bill to a point where I can enroll for the spring semester. This was a temporary solution because went the bill came in for the spring I found out I had nearly $11,000 on my account that needed to get paid off to enroll in the fall semester.

This is why I am calling for your help. I am a struggling student trying to find ways to make ends meet for myself and my disabled mother and be able to stable living for us and I also want to be able to give back to my community and the things I experience makes my passion even stronger than ever to give back to ones that been in similar situation as me. If you donate you are investing in situation who wants to give back and make the future better for his and other communities and make a difference in the world.

Thank You, Samuel Bails Stewart