Jonesboro, AR – (JonesboroRightNow.com) Sept. 19, 2024 – For almost a year, the Promise House residents have learned to grow and succeed through transitional living and powerful faith.
The Promise House in Jonesboro is a faith-based transitional living home for eight female residents, which also serves as a life rehabilitation program through the Southwest Church of Christ.
Dana Moore, Southwest Church of Christ Ministry Leader, said the home aims to provide a supportive home to homeless women and assist them with finding resources and agencies to permanently end their homelessness.
The house, funded by the church, opened in October of 2023.
“It was a really old house,” Moore said. “They redid everything, and it took us months, but it is beautiful, and I just love it. There are some that were like, ‘Well, we could probably build something that would be a lot more efficient’ because old houses don’t have enough electrical outlets, the big bathroom was downstairs instead of upstairs and most of the bedrooms were upstairs. So, if you were building something new, you probably wouldn’t build it exactly like this, but I love this and so do they [the residents]. They all love it.”
Only eight non-family members can stay in the home, as any higher would require the property to be rezoned as a homeless shelter.
Moore said they get their residents from many different places, from referrals to jail to other programs and rehabs.
“Sometimes when they leave there, they need a place where they can go that they can work and save enough money to get out on their own,” she said. “It’s transitional living, so if you’re transitioning from any other program where you still need to be able to pay a little bit of rent every week and save money to get out on your own because it’s hard to start on your own. There’s not enough affordable housing around here.”
All but one resident has had felonies and been on parole or probation.
“We try to help them with all of that,” Moore said. “We report to their officers and send them an update every month, letting them know mostly how good they’re doing. There’s a few that we’ve had to email and say, ‘Well, she left today.’”
In addition to funding, the church community also helps with donations for the home.
“Southwest is a big church. I have so many people at the church that want to do something here and I can’t even think of what I could get them to do because I have so many people that want to be a part of it, which is nice. If we didn’t have the church, I think we’d probably be in big trouble,” Moore said. “The girls tell me that they are low on laundry detergent. I put it in the publication for Sunday, and we’ll have a pallet of laundry detergent to pick up. They get everything they need and more.”
Unlike similar programs, Moore said the Promise House has no set graduation.
“No other house does that that I know of,” Moore said. “No other program has a floating graduation date. It just depends on their skills to make money and their skills to live alone, which is why we give them financial counseling well.”
The Promise House does not take the residents’ money, but they assist with getting them checking and saving accounts and providing individualized financial plans. The residents are also encouraged to save 30% of their take-home pay.
Since the Promise House opened, they have already seen three graduates.
“We tell them, ‘This is your six-month plan. This is so you can start out and get used to getting up every morning, going to work, saving money, paying your fines, doing the things that you need to do for life, and then from there, you start looking for a better job.’ So, the first six months, they’re just trying to get settled and into the routine,” she explained. “We really produce good employees because we give them transportation. We drug test them for you. We do everything that makes it easy for someone to hire them.”
House Mother Wilma Andrews, 37, who is about to be moving out on her own, has been there for ten months.
“We actually took Wilma straight from jail,” Moore said, adding that she already knew Andrews a little because she had grown up at the church. However, she got to know her even better while she was in jail via email.
Andrews said her time at the Promise House has been the best year of her life.
“When I think about every trial that I’ve had in my life, I always felt it was so hard to get through. I couldn’t get through anything. I was going to learn my lesson the hard way,” Andrews said. “Now, here I am going through trials and I have learned to trust God and to put my faith in something bigger than my own understanding, and every door has opened.”
Andrews added that just recently, her charges have been dropped, she paid her lawyer, got custody of her son, and bought a house.
Andrews was an addict for 17 years and has been to prison nine times.
“I was going through a lot of grief, and at some point, my grief just became a habit,” she said, noting her mother died when she was 18, and that she was the one who had to decide to take her off life support.
Andrews added that she didn’t know how much that moment would affect her, and she didn’t know how to talk to her family about what she was feeling.
“Years after losing my mom, I felt like somehow or another, it was my fault that I lost my mom because I took her off life support and then whenever I realized that, it affected me further into where I was already in my addiction,” Andrews continued. “So that’s just all I knew and, at one point, that habit had just become my lifestyle. Going to prison was normal. Going to jail was normal. I did it for so long.”
However, she started thinking about wanting to get clean last year. She got clean, but after six months with no support, she relapsed.
“I didn’t know where to turn. My family? I couldn’t turn to my family, not yet anyway. I didn’t even know how to go to work,” she said. “When I relapsed in those three weeks, I was done. I realized at that time that it was not what I wanted to do anymore. When I went to jail this last time, it was the hardest time I’d ever had in jail because I always felt like I could do jail time before because I was prepared for it. It was going to be the consequences for my actions, and I accepted that. I just thought, ‘This is not what I want to do anymore.’”
Andrews said while she was in jail, she prayed to God for help and would ask her public defender for any way to help she needed.
“I was desperate to find anything that would help me and then I asked Miss Dana,” she said.
She said that she didn’t want a way out of jail, she wanted a way out of her addiction and lifestyle. This is when she started helping Moore teach an ‘embracing purpose’ class in the jail and began doing jail ministries.
Moore added what an inspiration Andrews has become for the girls in the jail chapel. Not only had she been there herself, but she also knew many of the women.
“They see her doing so well and think, ‘Wow, it’s possible,’ Moore said, noting that all these women need is somebody who believes in them and gives them a hand up. “If she had gone to court from jail, she would have gone back to prison, but we had the public defender to keep continuing her court out so we could have as much good time as possible before she went before a judge. That’s what we did and when they dropped the charges, it was amazing, and we both cried all day that day. Why are we always so shocked when God does what we ask? We pray for it, and then we’re like, ‘Oh, wow. It happened.’”
Although Andrews is graduating and moving to her new home with her youngest son, she said she still plans to help at the Promise House as well.
“Every morning, I always pick up my Bible and read devotional, and I picked it up and I read it this morning and it was something in the sense of, ‘Don’t let your past mistakes define you today. I want to do good things through you,’” Andrews said. “So, I said, ‘God, I trust you’ and literally an hour later, my prayers were answered.”
To know more about the Promise House, call 870-932-9254 or text 870-897-7222.