In 2003, Silena Layne became the first person in her family to graduate from college. She has had to fight every step of the way to make it.

"I feel really overwhelmed," she says. "I feel very supported, nurtured and developed. I feel like an adult now. I'm whole."

Silena had to find the support to make it by herself. She was 19 years old when we first met her. She and her 17-year-old sister, Shivawn, were living totally on their own in East Oakland. No welfare, no parents to rely on.

Silena's mentor Marilyn King says, "If you can imagine children from the time they're infants, where no one cares whether you wake up in the morning, whether you have food in your belly, whether you have clothes, whether you go to school. No one cares."

Silena and her sister worked minimum wage jobs after school to pay the rent and support a younger brother. Their parents left them with relatives when drugs and alcohol took over.

"That's something that will never go away. When you feel rejected, left alone and abandoned that's the hardest thing in the world to accept because you know it was done intentionally," Silena says.

But Silena's biggest worry has always been that she would lose her brother to the streets. In that school year alone, Silena's family knew of seven people who were killed in Oakland. "Sometimes I don't think my brother is gong to live to be 18. Where he hangs out, what he does, the people he hangs with. I don't think he's going to make it," Selena said.

In the years after that interview, life got even harder. Relatives moved into her apartment and wouldn't leave. Everyone was evicted. The situation with her brother got worse. Silena was homeless again. Her money was stolen. "I was basically trying to survive," Silena says.

So it was nothing short of a miracle when Silena managed to apply to USF and was accepted. Because she was homeless, the letter went to her mentor, Marilyn King.

"We both knew it was life changing," King says. "We both knew that was a day, if you could mark one day in her life, where you could say, here was a moment, this was it."

The ability to accept help from mentors like Marilyn King may have been one of Silena's greatest strengths. They supported her until she was finally able to stand on her own two feet.

When she walked into her dorm room she felt as if she had found a stable home, at least for a year and she was committed to making the best of it. And she did. Two years later she graduated.

Silena says, "Walking across the stage and shaking the president's hand was heaven sent. It was like my grandmother said something from the heavens above, 'do your thing girl.'"

Upon graduation, Silena spent a year in the Peace Corps. in Swaziland working at an orphanage before returning to San Francisco where she is now an elementary school teacher.

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