A typical weekday for Claudia Anderson begins at 7 a.m. when she
gets her 8-year-old son Brandon ready for school. Anderson then
drives to San Jose City College, where she attends classes full
time, completes her homework and returns to her apartment at the
John H. Boccardo Family Center in San Martin in time to make dinner
for Brandon and daughter Arianna, 4.
SAN MARTIN
A typical weekday for Claudia Anderson begins at 7 a.m. when she gets her 8-year-old son Brandon ready for school.
Anderson then drives to San Jose City College, where she attends classes full time, completes her homework and returns to her apartment at the John H. Boccardo Family Center in San Martin in time to make dinner for Brandon and daughter Arianna, 4.
In the best case scenario, she may soon find herself and her children at another shelter. If she is unable to find something, there is no Plan B, the 33-year-old Chicago native says. She has lived at Boccardo, a county-supported shelter for low-income families struggling to find affordable housing, since December 2006 and her stay is up.
“I don’t have anything here but this place,” Anderson says, her eyes swelling with tears. “My family’s gone … I’m not used to that.”
Anderson’s family life has been anything but stable. Born and raised in southwest Chicago, Anderson, who is of Colombian and Mexican descent, was molested as a child and dropped out of the seventh grade. She earned her GED in 2000. She bounced around various youth programs, but it was all for naught. “After that I went downhill,” she says. “I started doing dumb things, like running away from my problems.”
She became pregnant in Chicago but her children’s father moved to San Jose. Promised that he’d help her and the children if she moved. Anderson left her Chicago apartment, car and job behind and did just that in May 2006.
“I left everything to be able to have my children raised in a two-parent home,” she says. “At least that’s what I was promised.”
It didn’t happen that way. She and her children’s father were involved in a “domestic situation,” and when police responded, officers recommended she move to a shelter in San Jose. Having saved up money, she “knew I had to get out” and proceeded to do just that. As a single mother with children, she was referred to Boccardo, which houses families. “I was all scared,” Anderson recalls about moving to Boccardo last December.
Anderson has her future planned out, with one exception: where she is going to live. After SJCC, she plans to transfer to Cal State Monterey Bay because “they have a good social work program,” and she wants to earn a bachelor’s and master’s degrees to “prevent to kids what happened to me,” she says.
Finding an affordable place to live on her $723 CalWORKS monthly check is Anderson’s biggest dilemma. A used laptop is also something she needs, so that she can complete her school work, she says. Also on Anderson’s need list is a high blood-pressure monitor.
Despite the setbacks and uncertainty here, Anderson says going back to Chicago is not option. After all, she is motivated by her children and the families she feels she can help with her personal experiences.
“I’m trying to be an example for them,” she says.
HOW TO HELP
To help Claudia Anderson with finding housing, to donate a laptop or provide other resources, call the John H. Boccardo Family Living Center at
(408) 686-1300 and ask for case manager Irene Aguilar.
