One mom. One goal. One incredible success story.
Tara had nothing left.
She was a single mother raising five kids and her life was unstable, her future uncertain. She had been staying with family for a bit, but that arrangement soured and she and her family were all of a sudden out of a house and into a hotel. That’s where they would stay for the next month as she scrambled to find something - anything! - that would offer a path out of homelessness.
That door opened when a social worker referred Tara to Seacoast Family Promise. She joined the program and painstakingly built a new life for her family, brick by brick.
As she would find out, none of this would be easy, and persistence and patience and the will to not give up were the necessary ingredients to success. But to have the security and stability that Seacoast Family Promise provided lessened the burden significantly.
“Back then I was trying to find a place, and find a job to afford that place,” Tara recalls. “It helped so much not to have to worry about the excess of bills and shopping for groceries.”
That lack of worry quickly turned into an overwhelming sense of “relief off your back,” as Tara says, allowing her to exhale and work towards finding that elusive job she needed to support her comeback story.
“There are a lot of jobs, but what I found out there wasn’t enough to afford a life for my family,” she says.
“When I was Seacoast Family Promise, I realized that even if it wasn’t your ‘home,’ it was still your home.”
But Tara kept at it, refusing to give up and emboldened by the support and skills she received from Seacoast Family Promise.
And then, something came across her radar and like the light-in-the-gloom intervention she received from the case worker way back when, a life-changing opportunity presented itself. She found a job opening for a bank compliance position that would check all the boxes: compatible with her skills and experience, flexibility for her family, good pay, and tons of potential.
“I thought it was a longshot job,” she says. “I answered it, did the interview, but I honestly didn’t think I had it.”
Then she received the astounding news.
“They gave me the position!’ she says (and you can still see her excitement hasn’t ebbed even now recounting that moment). “I was stunned and psyched.”
Today she is living with her family in a three-bedroom home, just steps from her children’s school. It was a seemingly out-of-reach goal from the days when she and her kids had no place to live. But thanks to her tenacity and the envelope of care and support she received from Seacoast Family Promise, the future is much brighter.
“When I was Seacoast Family Promise," she says, "I realized that even if it wasn’t your ‘home,’ it was still your home.”