Former Welfare Mother Devotes Time to Volunteer Group : 7th-Grade Dropout Helps Women Graduate

There are still times when seventh-grade dropout Carol Sasaki remembers where she came from, back before lunch at the White House and all the talk shows, and she has to get away.

“I start to feel artificial and I want to go home,” she said, explaining the delightful difficulties of her new life.

Just a few years ago, she was a welfare mother who had failed three times at a high school equivalency certificate. Today, she pours herself into a mainly volunteer effort called HOME, which provides the emotional and moral support that women on welfare need to get themselves through college.

“We fight the concept that everyone who’s on welfare is stupid,” Sasaki said.

HOME stands for Helping Ourselves Means Education, and 3,000 women nationwide are involved. Over HOME’s first three years, Sasaki has tracked more than 850 welfare recipients who followed her lead and bootstrapped their way into college and solid academic averages.

Sharing Information

“We don’t have members,” Sasaki said. “These are people who are stuck in poverty and those who have made it out. The whole point is to share the information that gets you out.”

Her son, 6 1/2-year-old David, was 2 when Sasaki decided she had had enough.

“David was the big thing for me,” she said. “I looked around the (Seattle) neighborhood and said, ‘This is no place for a child.’ ”

Painfully aware of her lack of education, she talked her way into a community college and caught the attention of two English teachers. “I needed work on my spelling and grammar, but my ideas were very good,” she remembers one teacher telling her.

She grinned and tossed her shoulder-length light brown hair, remembering. “Oh, I walked home so excited that day. ‘Your ideas are very good. ‘ I just kept repeating it. I was thrilled.”

Her fine-boned features and the ease with which she wears a proper navy blazer today don’t say a thing about how far she has come.

Strikes Against Her

Sexually abused as a child, she ran away from her affluent Mercer Island home at 13, wound up unmarried and pregnant at 24. She once had every strike against her--including herself.

“I used to think there was something wrong with my brain,” she said.

At 31, Sasaki is a success by any standard. She whipped through her undergraduate and master’s degree work in three years at Washington State University and is on her way to a degree in international studies.

Her doctoral research is on the plight of unwed mothers in developing countries.

The 4 1/2 years since her last Aid to Families with Dependent Children check have not dimmed the memories of what it’s like to be on welfare, buffeted by bureaucracies and other people’s decisions.

She remains surprised that the state’s Employment Security Department has been so much help, she said. HOME’s newsletter is published there free.

“Being someone who was caught in the system and who has a lot of resentment toward the bureaucracy, I was astonished.”

Message Goes Nationwide

Her efforts first were concentrated on the people she met in Pullman while on her fast-track degree program. Now, a national newsletter and ambitious travel schedule take the message nationwide.

HOME meetings are times to share information.

“We have only two rules: no politics and no complaining,” she said. “We came up with the second rule because we were spending hours complaining about the welfare system and no time helping ourselves.”

She never lets anyone forget they must do it themselves.

The financial aid, loans, grants and scholarships are there, along with the subsidized housing, but the bottom line is always the woman herself and what she’s willing to do, Sasaki said. “Making it through college and getting off welfare is still horribly, horribly difficult.”

Offers Suggestions

At a recent session at the Spokane YWCA, Sasaki fielded questions and offered suggestions about college applications.

Dress conservatively, she said. Lower your voice. Some of it sounds a lot like Miss Manners or John Molloy. More of it is straight former street-kid Sasaki.

“Sure, it’s baloney,” she said bluntly at one point, “but it’s the game you have to play.”

A year and a half ago, she married Glen Sasaki, a graduate student in molecular genetics. He often spends weekends helping with the mountain of correspondence that pours into their modest home.

After she had embarked on her doctoral degree, she spent three months in Asia doing research. She was appalled by what she found, which frequently included mothers forced into prostitution to support their illegitimate children.

“I decided the world can’t be this cruel,” she said. “I remember thinking, ‘There has got to be one state in one country where a woman can go from poverty to success without going through the bedroom of a man.’ ”

Honored by Reagan

Last spring, President Reagan named her one of 19 “heroes of the heart” for voluntary community work.

She is still shopping for a corporate sponsor to help HOME expand far beyond Washington state’s boundaries.

Exposure on national shows such as “Donahue” has brought a number of inquiries. The Seattle-based Boeing Co. has given managerial time to get HOME better organized. Weyerhauser gave money.

Sasaki hopes for enough money to hire a professional manager so she can stick to speaking and stop worrying about nonprofit tax forms and such.

Not all the old terrors have gone away. Sasaki still can’t sleep in a dark room. But she can sit still and laugh as she admits that she probably got those straight A’s in college because she was “so scared it was going to end.”