Program gives the homeless a new start

The kind of Thanksgiving that filled Lisa Brown with comforting memories had slipped through her fingers.

Instead of the good silverware, steaming macaroni and cheese, and the punch bowl with the sherbet floating in it, last year's Thanksgiving was about someone else's house and someone else's holiday.

Lisa Brown and her children were homeless, staying with friends.

But in a matter of months, Brown went from sleeping in an enclosed porch to her own four-bedroom apartment. This year, Brown won't be just celebrating the holiday in someone else's home. She has her own.

In August, Brown moved into Hope Gardens, an eight-unit transitional-housing facility for homeless families in Ambler. The program offers an apartment for two years, job counseling, therapy sessions, and educational programs.

Participants must be employed or full-time students and pay 30 percent of their income in rent, said Laura Wall Starke, executive director of the Inter-Faith Housing Alliance of Ambler, which sponsors the program.

The network is a group of 19 congregations that provide housing and meals for homeless families on a monthly rotation. The Hope Gardens program has helped nearly 65 families become self-sufficient since it opened in 1995, Starke said.

Brown moved in after a stringent selection process that included a police background check and interviews that included her children, Amber, 12, Miles, 8, and Kasi, 7.

"I'm grateful for everything my friends did for us," said Brown, 38, "but it's so nice to know that I'm not going to have to sleep on a porch."

For her, home was a transitory place starting from a young age. She was the only child of a woman - an office manager - who led a troubled life fraught with drug addiction, she explained.

Brown grew up in Philadelphia and lived alternately with her mother and grandparents. When her mother moved to Miami, she sent for her then 10-year-old daughter. It went badly.

"I loved my mother, but that nurturing thing, she didn't have it," said Brown, who moved back with her grandparents after four years.

Brown went on to graduate from Olney High School and enrolled at West Chester University. Lacking direction and motivation, she flunked out after two years.

"Sometimes young people don't listen to what you tell them," said her grandmother, Ernestine Adams, 82, of Philadelphia. "You tell them to stay in college, stay away from the wrong people, dating the wrong guys. But they're grown. They do what they think they have to do."