Reunited family happy at home

For our Year-end Campaign, Family Renew Community is highlighting a few 2017 success stories that prove your help is the key to ending family homelessness. Please click here to make a year-end gift.

Facing up to her drug addiction and getting the help she needed meant Ashley would have to abandon the life she knew and do the hard work of building a better one. She had to do it, though, if she was ever going to be the mother her two young children deserved. So she went into residential treatment when her children, ages 5 and 7, went into foster care.

At the point in her recovery when she was ready to go home, she had no home. And no job. And no hope of getting her children back until she had both.

She found her hope at Family Renew Community.

Ashley passed her entry drug screening, as all applicants must to be accepted into Family Renew Community’s housing program, and moved into a furnished one-bedroom apartment at the Daytona Beach Residential Campus for single mothers and their children in October 2016.

“She was reunified with her two young children by Thanksgiving,” reports Laurie Archer-Dugo, who runs Family Renew’s Daytona Beach campus. “During the coming months they made huge strides!”

With case manager Laurie’s guidance and support, Lisa began working as a hostess at a local restaurant, soon moved up to server and put money a housing each week. Meanwhile, she enrolled her children in school. The three received family therapy to start healing and strengthening their relationships.

Well in time for this year’s Thanksgiving, Lisa and her children moved into a rental apartment of their own. She’s been promoted to a leadership position at work and the kids are doing well in school.

“Watching this family come together and grow together has been a wonderful experience,” Laurie says.

(Note: Photo depicts models, not Ashley and her family.