Help Tabitha Return to School and Save the Planet

Hi! My name is Tabitha Bowling. I am 24 years old and currently trying to go back to school full time to pursue a biology associate's degree at Ozark Technical Community College and then transfer onwards to Missouri State to gain a bachelor's in environmental science with an emphasis in botany.

I am deeply passionate about local agriculture and mutual aid and have always possessed a love and respect for the planet. I love gardening in my free time and belong to a long family line of farmers. It’s something intrinsic to who I am and what I feel most passionate about. With looming threats of climate change sending many of us into spirals of hopelessness, it feels imperative to learn whatever essential ecological skills I can to protect the earth and those that will inherit it.

I lost my mom in the summer of 2020 and it made it extremely difficult for me to manage work and school full time. I attempted to take a few classes a semester until I finally made the decision to drop out and take a break until my mental health improved—but this meant owing over $1,000 in past tuition fees. At this time, my work had cut my hours due to covid and I was only being scheduled part time which was barely enough to cover my rent. I didn’t qualify for food stamps or unemployment and had to use my credit card in order to pay for groceries.

I am finally in an era of my life where I feel I am capable of managing school, my personal life, and work again but have found myself in a stall trying to pay this amount off despite knowing if I could—I would receive enough financial aid from FAFSA in order to cover my tuition full time for the fall and spring semester and the semesters hereafter.

Inflation has made everything beyond expensive—from rent to groceries to medical bills, I find I can only really save a small portion of money back at a time until some ungodly expense swoops along to erase it all away and I’m back to stage one of working full time trying to get back to where I began. Coming up with $1,000 out of nowhere has been incredibly hard for me and I’ve felt an immense amount of anxiety and doom trying to save enough back to pay it in the last year.

If anyone has the capacity to help—even in a small way, it would help me so much and I would be beyond grateful. My goal is to try to save as much as I can before August 12th when classes begin so I can enroll beforehand—but I am far off from reaching that goal and trying to think of as many creative ways as I can to gather what I need.