Heights High grad receives church's racial-repair award

Natasha Lovelace

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Natasha Lovelace was “shocked” to receive Forest Hill Church’s first Racial Educational Debt Repair Award.

“I’m 37, and at times, it’s been hard to see the light at the end of the tunnel,” said Lovelace, a 2005 Cleveland Heights High School graduate. “Receiving this has given me hope; like I’m not doing all this work in vain.”

The Presbyterian congregation will pay off some $65,000 in student debt for Lovelace. “It’s life changing,” she said.

In 2024, Forest Hill Church’s Racial Repair and Restoration Task Force proposed student-debt relief as a tangible way to address the legacy of systemic racism in its community. It decided to assist a Black female college graduate with ties to Cleveland Heights based on evidence that Black students disproportionately rely on loans to finance their education, and that the resulting debt often undermines their upward mobility.

Lovelace, who heard about the initiative through an article in the October 2024 Heights Observer, was among more than 20 applicants for the inaugural award. The church hosted a reception on May 15 to celebrate Lovelace and redouble its commitment to racial repair and reinvestment.

“What began as a bold idea took root and grew until the church embraced it,” Quentin Smith, a task force member, said, addressing the ecumenical audience of more than 60 people at the May 15 event. “This will transform Natasha’s credit, her choices and her future.” 

“All of this support and community, it’s beautiful to see,” Lovelace added. “It gives me the perseverance to keep going.”

Perseverance has defined Lovelace since high school. After giving birth to daughter Makayla while at Heights, she left Kent State University after one semester because there was no on-campus housing and little support for single mothers. She then joined the Army where she served for nearly 18 years, including in Afghanistan. While in the Army, she married and had two more children, earned a sociology degree from Cleveland State University, and began work on a master’s degree.

Then, in 2021, Makayla was hit in the head by a stray bullet en route to work. Lovelace recalled trying to do homework in her comatose daughter’s hospital room. Caring for Makayla and her other two children, Simon and Minnie, eventually forced her to drop out of her graduate program with “thousands and thousands of dollars of debt for a degree I didn’t get.”

Four years later, she’s working in mental health and social services and nearing completion of a graduate degree in psychology from Tiffin University. The night before she was recognized at Forest Hill Church, Lovelace was at Hiram College, where Makayla, a public health major, was honored for her work against gun violence. “She’s a miracle,” said Lovelace.

So, she said, is the award—believed to be the first of its kind in Ohio and possibly the nation. “The fact that the church even has a group of people who are willing to dig this deep—to look for root causes—that alone is priceless,” Lovelace said.

“This is not the end,” Smith said. “This is the beginning.”