Diana Spatz

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1996

Diana Spatz

Lifetime, Low-Income Families' Empowerment through Education

http://www.geds-to-phds.org

Berkeley, California, United States

Education & Youth Leadership

The Bold Idea:

Lifetime is a nonprofit organization created by student mothers at the University of California Berkley who completed college degrees while raising their families on welfare, and who are committed to helping others do the same. Lifetime’s mission is to empower low-income parents to determine, pursue, and achieve their goals for education, employment, and economic security. Lifetime offers service learning classes through four universities and colleges in the San Francisco Bay Area through which low-income student parents learn to develop peer-based support services and program strategies to continue their routes to self-sufficiency. Lifetime brings the collective voice of low-income student parents to the policy process to advocate for family economic self-sufficiency as the goal of welfare reform.

Biography:

Diana Spatz is the founder and director of LIFETIME.  She is a former welfare recipient, and mother of 19-year old daughter Eden. She founded LIFETIME in 1996 upon graduating with honors from the University of California Berkeley with a BA in Political Economy of Industrialized Societies, and being awarded an echoing green Public Service Fellowship.  An award-winning author and advocate for low-income families, Ms. Spatz won the 1996 I.F. Stone Award for Journalism by The Nation magazine for “Welfare Reform Skips School,” an article on the role of higher education in welfare reform.   Ms. Spatz currently chairs the Education and Training Task Force for the statewide advocacy group Californians for Family Economic Self-Sufficiency and is a member of the California State Legislature Joint Committee to End Poverty in California (EPIC).