SANTI'S EMERGENCY TUITION FUND

(I hope I can hit a higher goal than the one stated above but am grateful if I'm able to meet that. All funds that exceed my needed goal will go towards future tuition payments, and if it (hopefully) exceeds the future semesters of tuition cost, it will go to my loans, rent, groceries, and utilities.)

I came out this past November to my family and was cut off financially.  This sudden shift in my financial standing has left me incredibly stressed and scrambling with the potential of needing to drop out because of money. If that happens I am in danger of losing my enrollment as well as my current financial aid package and scholarships. 

Since the summer of 2020, I've been paying for my own living expenses completely on my own including rent, electricity/utilities, groceries, wifi, etc. I work part-time to full time as a barista currently at 20-40 hours depending on my availability.
Although I love my job it's really hard to maintain over 20 hours while I'm a full-time student at RISD. Last semester I was able to barely manage a max of 20-35 hours. Because of the focus on work to support myself, make rent, and the expenses that come with generally being alive, my GPA has dropped from a 3.9 to a 3.2 which puts me in danger of losing my outside scholarship for future semesters. The current way I've been working is unsustainable with my school workload and has caused my schoolwork to suffer and put me at risk for losing a scholarship that helps me pay partially for my tuition annually.

I've been on testosterone since February of last year on and off (I stopped for housing security and safety reasons a few months in between due to living at home for the spring/early summer when we were sent home from school because of COVID, ). Once I moved to my current apartment I went back on testosterone and could no longer hide its results or who I am from my parents. 

I have been working as much as I can up to now to make up for what I can from the loss of financial support. I've shared tuition costs with my parents in the previous two years from my savings (of working as soon as I could when I turned 16 in high school.)

I believed that this semester and the future ones I would be paying significantly less on my part because I believed that if my parents did decide to cut me off financially once I came out, I would at least have been able to file as an independent for the spring semester. Unfortunately, that was not able to happen.


I've been in communication with my school's financial office which has told me to file this upcoming semester as an independent but is unable to review my dependency for the rest of the 2020/2021 year. 

I've exhausted all my options for financial help at this point and really hope that you can help me to pursue my dream of being a full-time artist in the animation industry, and being able to create media for underrepresented marginalized groups like myself.