Supporters came in their favorite fancy hats and pearls to a “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” themed tea party fundraiser hosted by EWU’s Home program March 7.

The proceeds from the fundraiser benefit child care scholarships offered by Home, which stands for Helping Ourselves Means Education. It is a program affiliated with the Women’s Studies Center on campus that provides resources and services to student parents.

“I think it really helps student parents a lot because student parents have a very different experience than students that don’t have kids that come to campus,” said Sally Winkle, director of women and gender studies. “For student parents, even in comparison to perhaps returning students, they have special kinds of experiences and needs that are different than students who live in the dorms or live in an apartment right by campus or whatever.”

Proceeds from this event will go toward next year’s scholarships.

Current scholarship winner Calysta Noah said the benefits of the Home child care scholarship help her greatly throughout the school year.

“I’m a single mom, and I’m going to school full time. I don’t work, so paying for daycare is really hard. It’s really expensive,” Noah said. “It’s greatly lessened my load for how much I have to pay for daycare each quarter.”

The $900 scholarship is dispersed evenly throughout the year. Noah said she pays about $300 a month for child care, so the scholarship covers about one month each quarter.

“It’s basically like you pay for two months and you get one month free. It actually works pretty well,” she said.

Current scholarship winner Melissa Halbrook and her husband are both students. She works at an unpaid internship and her husband works part time while balancing school.

“This has helped out a lot [by paying] for daycare for my youngest child,” she said.

Halbrook said applying to the Home child care scholarship was a simple process.

“I think that the application for this scholarship was a lot easier than some of the other applications that I did. It was really well-explained and easy to follow compared to some of the other ones that I had done before in the past,” she said.

In addition to providing scholarships, the Home program serves as a general resource for student parents.

“We really feel that by having the Home program, we can help them with resources, with figuring out where to go for various things and how to help get different kinds of their financial needs met as well as other needs for their kids,” Winkle said.

“We have a lot of things that we offer to parent students so that they can get the kinds of resources they need to succeed in college, which is what we want.”

The application for the Home child care scholarship for the 2013-2014 school year is due April 25. Applications can be picked up in Monroe 207.