Meet Our Moms: Funmi - Mama of 2
Funmi, a hard-working mama of two, loves to cook. Feeding folks is her passion, what fuels her work as the operator of a catering business. She offers meal prep services, and serves up dishes for events like baby showers and birthday parties. Work was steady for Funmi before the pandemic hit. After COVID though, she found herself with far fewer clients.
“[The business] has its days,” she says. “It gets slow and then it goes up. It just depends. It’s been okay, but before COVID hit, I was doing way better.”
In the months following lockdown, Funmi worked hard to brand her catering business, doing everything she could to get her name out there, while also juggling the work required of a single mama, taking care of her one-year-old daughter and eight-year-old son.
All the while, the bills kept coming. Funmi found herself needing a little extra help—and that’s when her cousin told her about Tender.
“She’s a mom as well,” says Funmi. “She has a daughter, and she referred me. She said, ‘there’s this page that helps a lot of single mothers out there.’”
So Funmi reached out, and Tender was able to not only provide diapers for her little girl, but also help keep Funmi and her children housed, paying her rent for the month.
“It was so amazing,” she says. “I literally looked into my email when I woke up, and was just like, ‘God, you are so amazing.’ I just started crying and praying at the same time. It just came out of nowhere, because I didn’t know you were going to pay it on time, before the fifteenth. I was crying on the couch, just thanking God so hard because it was just a blessing. A whole miracle.”
Like many mamas looking for help, Funmi’s past experiences seeking out financial aid hadn’t been so great. Resources were hard to find, she says, and the application processes for the resources she did locate were discouraging and difficult to navigate.
“But for Tender,” she says, “your [process] was so easy. I was like, ‘wow.’ I’ve never had an application for assistance that was easy, that everything was there that you needed to send off. Every time I’ve tried for rental assistance, there’s always so many questions. And I’d try to download my information onto the website, and I’d keep getting errors, so I’d just give up on it. But Tender’s application was very easy. It didn’t get complicated, and I didn’t give up.”
And we’re so glad she didn’t.
Tender was founded on the mission of helping mothers like Funmi gain access to the things they need to take care of themselves and their children in a way that’s simple, straight-forward, and shame-free—helping mamas get out of crisis mode so that they can begin to thrive.
Says Funmi, “Because you guys helped me with rent, I was able to get kitchen tools that I needed—baking pans, a knife set—I was able to buy things I needed [for my business] because you guys helped me out. Before I was like, ‘how am I going to get these tools that I need? I don’t even have a car. It feels like money’s going all over the place.’ But you guys helped a lot.”
“And that’s so important,” she says, “because there are a lot of people out here in this world that really need help. And what you guys are doing is so amazing, and God is gonna bless you guys even more. And I feel like just helping people in need is really important because you’re giving back. It makes me want to give back as well. So thank you so, so much.”