Nicole McCree is one busy lady. A single mom of two girls aged 14 and 3, she works as a customer service representative at the Meridian Star, is working on her bachelor's degree in social work at Mississippi State University's Meridian campus, is a youth leader and active participant at Center Ridge Baptist Church in Shubuta, and still finds time to work as a server at a church member's new restaurant on her days off.
Thanks to a good G.P.A. and other qualifications, Nicole was the first recipient of the Meridian Star's $500 employee scholarship.
She said she first felt a calling toward social work when her eldest daughter, Nicoria, began school in Quitman. Nicole said she volunteered to work with second graders at the school and realized a huge connection with children.
When she learned that some of the kids needed help, Nicole said she would spend a lot of time at home thinking of ways to help them. "I just have a heart to help and to give," she said. "I want to make a difference. I feel like each day if I can help one person, motivate one person, bring one person up with me, then I feel like I will have done a great job for that day."
"My passion is children," she added. "I see so much aimed at our teenagers these days, and we need more people who care about the teenagers."
Along with helping kids, Nicole said she wants to help single moms who are on welfare turn their lives around. "A single mother as myself," she said, "because someone had to take me by the hand one day."
She said a counselor at Weems Mental Health, who is now a pastor at her church, helped her pull herself up by the bootstraps. "He saw something in me that I didn't see in myself," she said. And now she wants to do the same thing for other single moms.
Nicole said her church, which is led by pastors Lorenzo and Cathy Carter, is a huge part of her life.
"I came to this church at a very vulnerable time in my life," she said. "They took me in, not as a stranger, but as one of them."
The church continues to help her, she said, by teaching its members how to better handle whatever life throws at them using the scripture and by maintaining many outreach programs.
Next to God, Nicole said, the most important thing in her life is, "my two beautiful girls. I wait so eagerly to get home every day just to hear my three year old say Mommy."
Her priority, she said, is making a better life for them. As for how her studies are going, she said, "I'm so focused now you can't even knock me down."
Nicole is a senior at MSU-Meridian and will begin her field placement work in January. She will graduate in May of 2010. After graduating, she plans to pursue a master's degree in social work at either Jackson State University or the University of Alabama.
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