Life often gets in the way of adults going back to school. This Texarkana nonprofit has a solution.

Logan Garza arrived in Texarkana in early 2022 when she was transferred to the Bowie County Women’s Center. The center helps people completing court-mandated rehab – and Garza was moved there because after she started a jail sentence in another part of the state, she discovered she was pregnant.

Garza says realizing she was going to be a mom was a wake-up call.

“I had a really bad lifestyle. I was just in and out of jail all the time,” she said. “I found out I was pregnant with my first one; that’s whenever everything kind of clicked in place for me. I was like, I really have to get my life together. It’s do or die now.”

Garza first went to juvenile detention at age 12, and she never finished high school. She knew the first step to getting back on track was to get her GED, which she did while at the Women’s Center.

But as her release date – and her due date – loomed, she didn’t have anywhere to go.

As it turns out, Garza arrived in Texarkana at an opportune moment. Local organizations that provide social services had just started working together in a new way to help people like Garza who might otherwise fall through the cracks.

Books at the Literacy Council of Bowie and Miller Counties in Texarkana. Shelby Tauber / For Texas Standard

The 100 Families Program started in Texarkana in 2022 under the leadership of staff at the Literacy Council of Bowie and Miller Counties. The program originated in Arkansas, and the name comes from the idea that if you can help even just 100 families in a community, it makes a difference.

‘When life is hard, learning is hard’

Jenny Walker, who was the executive director of the Literacy Council at the time, brought the program to Texarkana to address a problem that, at first glance, might seem unrelated to Garza’s need for housing. Walker wanted to help ensure the Literacy Council’s adult education students would come to class.

“The reason that they were not coming consistently had nothing to do with their motivation or their ability to be successful,” Walker said. “It was all about life.”

Texarkana straddles Texas and Arkansas. Of all the adults in Bowie County, on the Texas side, and Miller County, on the Arkansas side, a combined 25% read at or below a first-grade level.

And while that number might sound high, Texarkana is only a few points higher than the national average. About 22% of American adults read at a Level 1 or lower. In Texas, it’s 28%.

People at this level of literacy struggle with things like filling out forms at the doctor, reading the questions on the driver’s license written exam, or understanding ingredients on food packaging.

The Literacy Council in Texarkana offers classes and resources to help people achieve their educational goals – but many students weren’t showing up, Walker said.

“I needed to figure out a way to help bridge those gaps because those other outside areas were definitely impacting their ability to be successful,” Walker said. “And one thing that I have said all along is that when life is hard, learning is hard.”

Walker went looking for a way to help adult learners address their needs beyond education – from food insecurity to homelessness to a lack of transportation. That’s when she found 100 Families. The program was working in a few counties in Arkansas, but it had not yet reached beyond state borders, and it was not designed to focus on literacy.

The idea is simple: 100 Families centralizes communication between organizations that help people get on their feet, according to Kristina Rivas, who runs Ground Floor Collective, the nonprofit that now oversees the 100 Families program in Texarkana. 

“We no longer, in our separate places, have to feel like we have to be the expert in all things,” she said. “We get to each focus individually on what our specialty is, but know that we have the right people in the community to lean on.”

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Participating organizations share a database where they can access case files and other client information, as well as make referrals. So if someone comes into the Literacy Council for tutoring and staff realize they don’t have enough to eat, for example?

“We can give them a warm handoff to the next agency so that we’re not just handing them a list of phone numbers that is overwhelming,” Walker said. “Then they have to tell their story a thousand times.”

This “not having to repeat their life story” piece is actually a huge part of increasing access and reducing stigma, according to Vashil Fernandez with the City of Texarkana, on the Texas side. He is also the chair of the Texarkana Homeless Coalition.

“Having to go search out all these things when they’re already not comfortable, and if they get turned down or get denied at one place, then that completely shuts a person off,” he said. “But if you’re in a system where all the people that can help you are connected and know what you need, and you’re just showing up and getting the help, it’s a lot easier.”

A common-sense solution

If you’re thinking this all seems like a common-sense solution to a problem that has plagued nonprofits and government agencies for years, you’re not the only one.

“When Jenny and I first started to even get this off the ground … when we were approaching people … most people said, well, doesn’t something like that already exist?” Rivas said.

Because 100 Families and the shared database concept was new to Texas, Rivas was met with some hesitation when she pitched it to community partners.

“I was essentially just selling a ghost,” she said. “There was not anybody within a hundred-mile radius that had tried anything like this.”

There was also concern from possible partners about how the program would impact their finances, since nonprofits often have to compete for too little funding. However, Rivas says it’s had a positive impact on bottom lines.

“Not only have everyone’s collective numbers increased because we now have those referral sources in place … that helps all of us collectively write our individual grants because we’re showing that growth,” she said. “But then we’ve also been able to write some collaborative grants where several of the organizations are being funded for bigger projects.”

Walker and Rivas showed local leaders data about the program’s success in Arkansas, and they got folks on board. To date, 100 Families in Texarkana has brought in over 100 community partners, including the East Texas Food Bank, Habitat for Humanity, the local Children’s Advocacy Center, and a number of organizations that serve people experiencing homelessness.

Logan Garza was one of Texarkana’s early 100 Families success stories.

In advance of her release from the Women’s Center in 2022, Garza was connected with a 100 Families case worker who pushed for her to be admitted to a facility that houses and assists young mothers, even though it wasn’t taking new residents at the time.

Rivas says that probably wouldn’t have been possible without the relationships built between organizations in the early days of the program.

“She would have not had anywhere to go because she was determined to stay here,” she said. “Or she would’ve had the only option left to go back to where she came from, which was not a good environment.”

Once Garza was situated in a place to stay with her newborn daughter, 100 Families made it easier for her to pursue her education.

“At this point I’m a single mother … I’m just now getting my life together, and if I’m being honest, like the last thing on my mind was college,” Garza said. “I’m like taking a leap of faith just thinking that I can do this by myself, you know, and be what she needs me to be. I didn’t think that I was going to be capable of much more than that.”

But staff at the Literacy Council pushed her to stick with it. During a process when many falter and stop going to class because life gets in the way, support from 100 Families helped Garza keep going.

“They really pushed me,” she said. “They just listen to you about how you got where you are, and they try and remind you that, you know, some things just don’t play in your favor. You know, life is hard for everyone – everyone makes mistakes, everyone messes up – but that doesn’t mean that you don’t have any potential … and that doesn’t mean that you can’t turn your life around.”

Generational changes

Karen Phillips is with the Arkansas group that manages the software social services organizations are using in Texarkana to communicate more effectively. According to her data, 25% of clients who came into 100 Families over the last year throughout Arkansas – and in the Texas half of Texarkana – did not have a GED or high school diploma. Now, almost half of that group either have their diploma or are working toward it.

Phillips says clients who stick with 100 Families longer have better educational outcomes – partly because education takes time to attain.

“Families do usually stay in the initiative for about eight months, and it takes much longer than that to get a GED or a high school diploma typically,” she said. “So the fact that we do have the increases that we have are really good.”

Another thing to consider is that every student has different goals. And measuring success with adult education is complicated because literacy means much more than just improving reading skills.

Beth Carlton, who has been tutoring at the Literacy Council for several years, says her teaching includes workforce training like job interview prep and how to write a resume.

“Most jobs now are applied for online, so some people don’t have internet access at home,” she said. “Many people are experiencing homelessness. They’ll come in and use our computers, but they need help with that job search, so we’ll help them with that.”

The Literacy Council also has volunteer financial advisers to help people learn how to build their credit score and save money. Volunteers helped several hundred families complete their tax returns this spring.

So how do you take all of these different types of learning and achievements and condense it down into numbers? According to Rivas, you can’t.

“The qualitative things, that’s what matters to us the most, because that’s where we’re seeing those generational changes,” Rivas said.

Candy Lee has seen generational change happen under her own roof. Lee dropped out of high school after she had her first child. In 2022, as a mother of four, she decided she wanted to improve her circumstances and go back to school.

Lee met with a tutor at the Literacy Council and went on to get her associate degree from Texarkana College. She’s now at Texas A&M Texarkana and plans to go into the nursing program.

She’s also working as the general manager at the local Habitat for Humanity Restore – a job she got through a connection she made within the 100 Families network.

“It’s motivating to know that you can go from not knowing to knowing, and it pushes you to want to know more,” she said. “And the excitement about my life and where it’s heading is the biggest difference.”

Now, the daughter Lee had when she was a teen is graduating high school and is off to LSU in the fall with plans to be a dental hygienist.

That right there is the point of all of it, according to Rivas.

The dashboard that facilitates this process ranks clients from a 1 to a 5 across 13 different areas including food, addiction recovery, housing and education. A 1 means a client is “in crisis” in that area, and a 5 means they are “thriving.”

“What’s great about this is that 1 to 5 scale is in all 13 of those areas, but those definitions are becoming our community standard,” Rivas said. “So when somebody says this person is in crisis in education, regardless of where you work, you understand what that means.”

A statewide solution

Texarkana is the only city in Texas that is using this dashboard model, but that won’t be true for much longer.

The City of Texarkana spent about $25,000 of its opioid settlement money to fully adapt the model for wider use. As of late May, any community in Texas can get trained and start using the database for a small processing fee.

Fernandez says his team is currently trying to get information from the Texas Homeless Network into the dashboard. Fernandez hopes other state agencies along with towns and other nonprofits in Texas will join, too. But he’s not surprised Texarkana was the first place in Texas to make the leap.

That’s because Texarkana faces more barriers than the average community in trying to help people. Being in two states, Texarkana receives funding from both Texas and Arkansas to fund social programs. But there’s a catch.

“Even yesterday I was having a conversation with a shelter on the Arkansas side,” Fernandez said. “They get rapid rehousing funds, but it can only house people on the Arkansas side.”

The same can be true of Texas. And Fernandez says this extra layer of red tape – where which state ID you have determines which organization can help you out – makes collaboration through 100 Families even more vital.

Rivas says her message to people considering starting a 100 Families program in their community is simple.

“What do you have to lose?” she said. “It can’t get any worse than it is right now by trying something that’s proven. It will change the way you do things internally, it will change your community as a whole over time, and it’s just, I mean, it’s the best thing. It really is.”

That community change is reflected in the changes that happen in individual lives.

Just look at Logan Garza. She’s come a long way since she was released from the Women’s Center almost three years ago.

Now a mother of three, Garza is on track to finish her associate degree at Texarkana College in December. She wants to go on and study psychology and then get a master’s degree so she can be a counselor and help people who are going through what she’s gone through.

She’s even thought about getting a Ph.D., though she’s not sure she’ll be able to swing it. But she says just having that dream shows she’s come a long way.

“I mean, I used to think that I was so incapable of making anything out of my life,” Garza said. “It used to make me so mad when people would tell me, you know, do baby steps, because I’m like, do you see how messed up my life is right now? Like, you think ‘baby steps’ is going to fix this? Now that I’ve done it, I’m like, gosh, why didn’t I just listen? Like, this is amazing.”

While she completes her associate degree, Garza has been working at the Literacy Council tutoring people in GED math. Her favorite part of her job is seeing people finally understand a concept they’ve been struggling with.

“Not only does it give me a sense of achievement, but it shows them like, hey, I can actually do this, like this isn’t just an impossible task for me,” she said. “There’s so many different kinds of ways to teach math. And that’s probably one of the hardest parts, too, is figuring out which way is going to work for what person. But yeah, seeing that light bulb click is just my favorite part.”

Texas Standard wants to hear from you

Texas Standard is exploring adult education as part of a series of stories. Adult ed can include GED classes, ESL classes, workforce training, or really anything that helps people be more successful in life.

Do you have an experience with adult education that you would like to share with us? Has adult ed impacted you or a loved one? We would love to hear more.

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