Fall 2022 Hoggatt Injury Law Children of Injured Workers Scholarship Winner

Téa Leone Fortune

This semester, our legal team is excited to award Téa Fortune with our Fall 2022 Scholarship. Téa is a passionate young adult who is pursuing a career in the film industry. She greatly enjoys creating stories that challenge people’s thinking and spread positivity. Her essay not only details her future dreams, but also honors her mother who has been recovering after a very serious car accident. We are proud to offer some support to Téa as she embarks on her study abroad semester in Switzerland.

Read Téa’s Essay:

My name is Téa Fortune and I am a junior at Pepperdine University. I am studying film, with an emphasis on writing for film and television. I write screenplays and teleplays that tell stories of underrepresented people in this world. I aspire to leave a legacy of vulnerable stories that challenge thinking and continue to invoke positivity in my community. I genuinely want to change this world for the better and ensure everyone has a seat at the table for anyone who wants to have one, especially in the entertainment industry. We create opinions, cultures, and standards through what we consume through the media, so It’s crucial that everyone has the opportunity to influence it.

I am a highly driven student. I’d like to receive my Master’s degree and dream of eventually earning my Ph.D. My academics are important to me, and I strive to do so much with them post-graduation. I hope to pay it forward by teaching future filmmakers what I’ve learned through the years. Knowledge is power. Whether I am learning about King Caesar, how the amount of sleep can impact how we spend our days awake, and how to hold a camera and write poetically in my scripts — I am learning so much to help me prepare for my biggest purpose in life — telling stories.

I couldn’t have dreamed of any of this without my mother. I am doing what I am doing today because of her. Being a single mother with two disabled children isn’t the ideal lifestyle people want to live, but she does it. She wakes up daily and is there for me whenever I need her. She has encouraged, challenged, and sacrificed her entire life for me, and I only want to make her proud and complete what she wasn’t able to do. One of the most important things she’s taught me to do is to celebrate my life. Celebrate the small things and even celebrate the tough times and the fact we got through them. She says life is too short to focus on the negative things but long enough to remember the good moments. We only get one life in this world, so we must live it to our fullest capability.

Unfortunately, she was in a terrible car accident while on her way to work in March of 2019 and has not been able to work since. Since then, life has been challenging for all of us. Bills are getting harder and harder to pay, unexpected medical bills keep stacking on top of each other, and I am going to college, and tuition is not as affordable as we would like. My mom struggles to do simple tasks such as taking a bath and putting on her clothes. It was hard to watch my mom, who was so full of strength and light, break down and cry because she couldn’t figure out how to buy food and other necessities or purchase gas to get to her next doctor’s appointment. My mother wants to contribute financially to my education and success. Still, she has multiple unpaid medical bills, mostly from treatments not covered by insurance, and cannot and is not sure if she will be able to continue treatment with such high outstanding balances.

The Hoggatt Injury Law Scholarship will help support my educational future and reach every single goal I’ve wanted since I knew I could write. This scholarship will help my mother not feel any burden of failing her child because she simply could not stop something out of her control. The Hoggatt Injury Law scholarship will help me this year to go abroad and be inspired by the world around me. For the academic year of 2022-23, I have the honor of studying abroad in Lausanne, Switzerland. While there, I will continue to complete my bachelor’s degree. I also hope to gain experiences I can bring back to my community and inspire them to explore the world around them. I want to create these experiences and inspire myself to create the best stories possible. The Hoggatt Injury Law Scholarship will be helping to achieve that dream and close the financial gap that stands in my way of embarking on this journey. There are so many stories that can be told and I cannot wait to see what I will write after this meaningful experience.