Grace had to make a decision no mother wants to face. With three young children, ages six, five, and one, she left an unsafe relationship and went to the Virginia Williams Family Resource Center, with almost nothing. They connected her to Community of Hope. She was 34, pregnant with her fourth child, and starting over from scratch.
“I had to leave everything behind,” Grace said. “Furniture, clothes, even my kids’ Christmas gifts. We had nothing.”
Grace and her children were placed at Girard Street, a Community of Hope family shelter that had just reopened for families in December. It was the middle of winter, including the 2026 storm, but the staff made sure they felt it as little as possible.
“If it was anything we needed, they made sure we had it,” she said. “Extra heaters, blankets, laundry supplies—you could tell the staff really cared.”
Through it all, her case manager Temika stayed close — checking in, connecting her to resources, and making sure nothing fell through the cracks.
“You can tell when someone truly cares, and she did,” Grace said. “She always answered my questions and made sure I had what I needed.”
Throughout her time at Girard Street, Grace’s children had a place to land too. Through Fam-Club, they could come downstairs to play games, do activities, and read with volunteers — a small but steady source of normalcy during an unstable time. There her kids formed connections that followed them out the door. At the Community Baby Shower in April, one of Grace’s children spotted a familiar face and ran up to say it: “Hey, you were at our old apartment.” Grace had expected the shelter stay to last months. Instead, a housing application she had submitted years earlier came through. The timeline still surprises her.
“Things happened fast,” she said. “I was in shelter in January, and by the end of February, we had moved into our own apartment.”
Community of Hope’s housing program helped furnish their new space, providing the basic household items a family needs to stop feeling like they’re passing through.
“That meant everything to us,” Grace said. “We had lost everything, and we were able to make our place feel like home again.”
As she prepares to welcome her new baby, Grace is also receiving support through Community of Hope’s HONEY program (Housing Our Newborns, Empowering You) which supports pregnant people experiencing homelessness through one of the hardest things to protect when you’re focused on survival: prenatal care. A perinatal care coordinator works alongside her, helping with transportation, attending appointments, making sure she has what she and the baby will need. The support runs until her daughter is six months old.
“When you’re looking for housing, it’s easy to skip important pieces of pregnancy,” said Monika. “That’s what HONEY is there for.”
In a few weeks, Grace will bring her daughter home to an apartment that is hers, in a city where she has support around her. But what’s around her now looks different.
“Motherhood has shown me just how strong I am. Our job is to protect our children at all costs—even if that means starting over and walking away from unhealthy situations.”
