Sisters Angela and Gina Weekley know their lives could have turned out differently.
They grew up in Waterloo, in a single-parent, low-income home where no one held even a high school level education. But they credited TRIO, a federal program administered by the University of Northern Iowa that provides services for elementary through high school students from disadvantaged backgrounds, with helping them overcome those obstacles and build successful careers and become local leaders and pillars of their community, with both being named to the Waterloo Courier’s 20 Under 40 list.
“Statistically, I should not be having this conversation with you,” Angela, currently the community inclusion manager at Veridian Credit Union and the oldest of the three Weekley siblings who all went through UNI’s Educational Talent Search and upward Bound programs, said. “The TRIO programs not only changed my life, but allowed me to model for my younger siblings.”