Shelter for the Soul
Faith, hope, and love abide at the Women’s Transformation Center.
The road to homelessness began for Eugenia Jones, as it seems to for many women, with car trouble. One morning in 2017, she went out to get into her 1996 green Buick and found that someone had broken into it and it wouldn’t start.
She was no stranger to hardship. She and her brother had been raised in the Carrie Steele-Pitts Home, an Atlanta orphanage, from the time she was four and he was five because their mother couldn’t take care of them. But she studied hard, earned a sociology degree from Bethune Cookman University, a private historically Black college in Florida, and went on to work in the field of education for thirty years. She was substitute teaching and attempting to set up a nonprofit after-school program for middle schoolers when her plans, and her life, started to fall apart. By the summer of 2018, she had moved into First Presbyterian Church’s Women’s Transformation Center (WTC). She was sixty-one years old, she had worked all her adult life, and she was homeless.
“I asked myself over and over again: ‘How did I get here? What am I supposed to learn from being in this situation?’” she said. After some initial bitterness, she said, she saw the WTC as “a system to get you back on your feet.”
The WTC officially bears the name of Edna Raine Wardlaw Coker, whose family provided funding. It has, itself, been transformed. Founded in 1981 with mattresses on the floor of an unused Sunday school room, it has become a first-rate facility nicknamed “the Ritz” by some of its residents.
Like other institutions, the WTC had to make adjustments in 2020 for COVID-19. When one woman tested positive for the virus, the church moved all the residents into a hotel to be quarantined, where they each had a private room. The WTC accepted no new residents after the start of the pandemic in March and stopped having overnight volunteers. The women were given leave to come and go from the church as they needed to keep working.
Some of the changes that give the residents greater responsibility for their own care, such as being able to stay in and have less volunteer supervision, may result in permanent modifications to the routine operation of the WTC, said Terresha Anthony, a licensed social worker who has served as case manager for the last five years. “We are taking steps every year to give the women more independence and to be sure we’re treating them with as much dignity as we can while making sure everyone feels secure and comfortable,” she said. Because time management is a challenge for some of the women, she said, increased responsibility is also good experience for handling their own affairs once they move out.
The WTC is housed on the fourth floor of the Hal and Julia Smith Christian Community Center. As many as twelve women can stay in rooms, with three beds and lockers in each.
A kitchen, dining room, television lounge, and computer room/classroom are available to everyone. Residents share laundry facilities and a large bathroom with plenty of showers.
The women can receive counseling through an arrangement with the Samaritan Counseling Center, just one floor down, and Anthony taps into other resources across metropolitan Atlanta to meet each woman’s specific needs. Through the Penny Hill scholarship fund, established with a grant from the Presbytery of Greater Atlanta in memory of a former First Presbyterian associate pastor who later became executive presbyter, they can apply for educational assistance.
Clarissa Charles, forty-eight, was attending classes at Atlanta Technical College, working part time in hair salons, and selling her blood plasma to make money when she learned about the scholarship.
“I asked myself over and over again: 'How did I get here? What am I supposed to learn from being in this situation?’”
EUGENIA JONES
She had first entered the WTC in January 2017 but left after a few months—before her finances were stable enough to sustain her, she said. In January 2018, when she again found herself without a place to live, she was readmitted and was awarded funds to cover her tuition. “I felt it was meant for me to go back,” she said.
Her goal was to be licensed as a master barber. She completed her training in May 2019. “One of the happiest moments in my life was when I graduated,” she said.
She left the WTC in October 2019 and lives in Crown Point, Indiana, and now has her own salon in Highland, Indiana.
Telling her story in a telephone interview, she began to cry. “My tears are of gratitude,” she said.
Michele Browder, forty-three, earned a bachelor’s degree in technical management at DeVry University. She was living at the WTC, working in patient access at Emory University medical center, and paying her own tuition and expenses at DeVry when she was awarded a Penny Hill scholarship. She was able to graduate in June 2020, the first person in her family to earn a college degree.
Women admitted to the WTC are working or going to school. Most are referred by other agencies. They can stay six months, and if they are progressing toward their goals and obeying the rules, they can have up to another six months. No one has been asked to leave during COVID restrictions. “We also make sure we don’t ask anyone to leave near the holidays,” case manager Anthony said. “The holidays can be very depressing, so we are mindful of that.”
Anthony meets individually with the women to help them make plans, set goals, and work toward them. And in non-COVID times, she arranges for a rotating series of classes such as yoga, art, budgeting, and meditation.
One small thing she has instituted that has had an oversize impact is the “gratitude box.” Many a night, as the women gather around the dining table, each will pull out a slip of paper with a category for a blessing: “Name something blue you’re thankful for” or “Name a fragrance you’re thankful for.” The object, Anthony said, is to help them focus on positive things. “Sometimes the brain can get stuck on the negative,” she said, “but the Bible says to be grateful in all things.”
Anthony said she was impressed when she started work at the WTC by how peaceful and clean it was. Residents share responsibility for keeping common areas immaculate by performing their nightly chores.
For Shalena Bland, forty-nine, the WTC offered “an opportunity to reflect on life, catch my breath, and understand who I am in God’s kingdom,” she said. She was juggling two part-time jobs, one at a factory and the other at a barber shop, when her car broke down and she had trouble getting to work. By the summer of 2016, she could no longer afford her apartment, and she contacted First Presbyterian.
She stayed at the WTC and worked with case manager Anthony until April 2017, when she moved into her own apartment downtown. She had paid all her debts, saved more than $6,000, and renewed her cosmetology license. Although she had to draw unemployment during COVID-19 and cut hair only by appointment, “I am reassured in who I am,” she said, “and I haven’t looked back.”
WTC volunteers say they are ministered to as they minister.
When Pete Boorn first thought of volunteering to stay overnight at the WTC in the early 2000s, he wasn’t sure whether, as a man, he should volunteer for that particular role in a women’s center. He learned that a handful of other men were already on the calendar as regular volunteers. He said that he doesn’t think of the residents as “homeless women” but just as women with the same joys, concerns, and ambitions as anyone else. He chats with them about their families and their challenges. “In some ways we’re all struggling with something,” he said.
In 2013 Pete married his wife, Erin; then Willa, now five, and Peter, now three, came along. His overnight stays became a family affair before COVID-19.
Gail Price began spending the night at the WTC almost as soon as she and her husband, Dave, joined the church in 1998. Her first sleepover was the last night in the old Sunday school rooms, before the big move into facilities especially designed for the women. “I love being part of our faith community that provides temporary housing and support to women in need,” she said. “Not only have I met many wonderful, thoughtful, and inspiring WTC guests over the years, I’ve also been blessed to partake in some truly yummy meals brought by other volunteers. . . . I grew to think of it as a welcoming second home.”
Karen Thompson, who began volunteering as a new member six or seven years ago, quickly decided that her special gift would be to make sure the women had holiday celebrations. She decorates the dining room in red, white, and blue for July Fourth, with pumpkins and ghosts for Halloween, and brings sparkling cider for New Year’s Eve. She also gets a list of birthdays and brings in cakes for the residents.
“When you’re away from home, personal things like celebrating birthdays are important,” she said. “Because I live alone, I identify with that.”
Even though the staff and volunteers do their best to make the women feel welcome and secure, losing a home brings on distress and anxiety. For Eugenia Jones, “being homeless was a very, very trying time,” she said. “I’ve had a lot of lows in my life, but that was the lowest.”
As she futilely attempted to start her car that morning in 2017, Jones knew she had no money to have it repaired. She had cashed in her retirement, paid off her bills, and hired a lawyer and a webpage designer to get her after-school program up and running. She had no savings left. Her brother was having financial difficulties, and her son had lost all his possessions in a fire. “The whole family was in crisis,” she said.
As a substitute teacher, she received no pay during the summer months, and at her age, she had difficulty finding a job. She eventually found warehouse work for $8.50 an hour, in a building that was “freezing in winter, sweltering in summer.” But even with the second job, she wasn’t making enough money to keep up timely payments on the apartment where she had lived for six years.
When she was forced to move out, she sought help at the Gateway Center, a homeless service center in Atlanta, and was referred to First Presbyterian.
Through the WTC’s partner, St. Joseph’s Mercy Care, she was diagnosed with depression and given medication, and she began seeing a counselor at the Samaritan Counseling Center. “That was very helpful,” she said. She worked with a life coach through the Atlanta Center for Self Sufficiency and saved her money. By April 2019, she was ready to move out. She claimed her own apartment in a building exclusively for older adults on June 13, 2019.
Pentecost Sunday, June 9, 2019, was the last Sabbath she would spend at the WTC. She arose early—as she often did—to volunteer at the church’s weekly prayer breakfast, a community meal open to all and shared by many who are unhoused or have experienced homelessness. When it was over, she went alone into the historic old sanctuary and lay prostrate on the chancel floor.
Lying there, she prayed, sobbed, and let go of the pain, fear, and resentment she had held on to since orphanage days. “I said, ‘Lord, I ain’t taking this with me anymore,’” she said. “‘I’m leaving it all here at First Presbyterian. I’m starting brand new.’”
Now in her own apartment, she has a job with the Salvation Army and is still working on setting up her nonprofit organization. She still sees a counselor from the Samaritan Counseling Center to get support and stay on track.
“And now faith, hope, and love abide,” she said, quoting the apostle Paul. With hope, she said, faith and love grow stronger.
She was transformed at the WTC, she said. It was there that she found hope.
