Lynchburg Business

Miriam’s House: An Empowering Anchor In The Storm

Issue: December 2010 by Maureen Cholewka in Inside The Magazine, Non-Profit

What does it feel like to have to choose between going home and being safe? How much pain or fear or loss does it take to know you need to fill out an application in order to get a brand new start? Can you picture taking your first step out of a safe haven house into the world, knowing you’re going to be okay, perhaps for the first time in your life? All these very real events take place within the walls of Miriam’s House, an innocuous mansion set on Magnolia Street in Lynchburg. Its grounds are well-tended. Its walls look established and stately, and behind every one of its windows is the evidence of an entire community invested in helping local women and children make the transition from instability and chaos to being viably employed, healthy of mind and ready for school.

Opened in 1994, Miriam’s House is an oasis in a desert of the wasteland felt when a home is lost, when funds run out, when life as women know it becomes like sand slipping through their fingers for a variety of reasons: mental illness, substance abuse, mismanagement of money, the death of a spouse, pregnancy, domestic abuse or family instability. Miriam’s House is not a shelter, which have their own short-term purposes, but is instead a nonprofit transitional housing program that can change a woman’s life over the course of two years, the maximum time a woman can reside there. Miriam’s House accepts both women with and without children.

Mary Alex, MSW, Executive Director, is a career-long advocate of national and international human rights and women’s rights, and it’s for this reason that she is passionate about the mission of Miriam’s House.

“A good percent are domestic violence victims, but not everyone,” Alex said. “Women that are pretty stable after being fresh out of a harsh experience are not going to be at Miriam’s House for longer than two years. Even that is long.”

The program takes referrals from many local sources and organizations, and there is a long waiting period after completing an application, due to Miriam’s House’s reputation for great results, and because people are there for a longer period of time.

“Two years is maximum. I want to see people be there a year.  These women can do tremendous work in their lives in a year. We’re not just going to let people hang out there. I want to get as many people as possible through the benefits of Miriam’s House,” Alex said.

Running a nonprofit today is really like running a little business, but it’s harder, according to Alex, because Miriam’s House is selling a mission. When people invest in Miriam’s House, they’re investing in the integrity of the organization. Unlike fund-raising for a local college where alumni or city residents know about it and want to fund it, investors will most likely never touch the services of Miriam’s House. Miriam’s House is not an island, but works with a huge list of many nonprofit organizations. One of the reasons Alex says she came from Washington., D.C., to work here is that Miriam’s House is embraced by the Lynchburg community.

“I have never witnessed in my career, the type of care, investment and, literally, the type of love that this community shows Miriam’s House. We get donations that just fall from the sky,” Alex enthused.

She tells the story of a local woman who died, and in her will, left Miriam’s House $47,000.

“She had never given a dime to us in her lifetime,” Alex said.

She acknowledges that Miriam’s House is very well-known and connected, its name being a familiar one at many corporate events and fund-raising parties—one that has always had a very solid reputation.

“I have a very strong nonprofit background, but I look at Miriam’s House as much more of a business,” Alex said. “I’m running it much more like a hybrid organization, different than these organizations have had to be run in the past. I really need to think, ‘How am I going to sustain this House with this huge downturn in the economy?’ I look at it with much more of a business lens,” says Alex.

Even the supplies at Miriam’s House are connected to the community. Miriam’s House works collaboratively with a local food bank, the USDA and a local milk producing company that gives the women and children’s program all of its juice and milk.

One example of community support from area churches is through their make-overs and updates of one whole room or suite at a time. This work gives a continual fresh, stylish look to the living spaces at Miriam’s House.

“The churches will totally re-decorate a room,” Alex said. “Curtains, bedspreads, paint, trim-work, décor, a nice throw carpet, plus they bring meals at other times, too!”

Elizabeth Forsythe, a prominent figure in Lynchburg society, founded Miriam’s House with the intent to support human and women’s rights. Unlike other options of respite where the children may be taken from in-crisis mothers, the idea behind Miriam’s House is that a woman can come to the safe milieu there with her children. The Forsythe family also founded Miriam’s House’s next-door neighbor and close partner, Elizabeth’s Early Learning Center, so that the children at Miriam’s House can receive their daycare nearby.

Miriam’s House serves only Region 2000 individuals. Other nonprofits, like those in larger cities, serve people that may drop into their communities temporarily. With Miriam’s House, local community members are supporting people in their own backyard—local women who will return to this community, work and live there once again, but this time, more successfully.

In this day and age, it is the rare service model that works with any population for up to two years.

“Think of how much your life has changed within two years,” Alex said. “No other treatment program allows for this sort of very individualized long-term treatment that the women of Miriam’s House get.”

Women coming to Miriam’s House can get themselves out of debt, if they find themselves in that type of situation (this during a time in which 50 percent of people who file for bankruptcy do so because of a medical condition). Alex says that because of this and other factors, there are people today who end up homeless who would not have five years ago, making the changing face of homelessness very evident.

“If I were to take a snapshot of the population now, it would not be the population of five years ago. I don’t even think we have gotten a person from the ‘street,’” Alex said.

Miriam’s House serves women who need to get out of a very bad situation, or whose families just can’t take care of them anymore. They reach out to women with HIV (AIDS), and women who are older than 45 years old.

“That is where there is an extreme need for more types of Miram’s Houses, because older women are becoming homeless today who are on a fixed income, whose  husband may have died, and these women never had any financial knowledge,” Alex explained.

Miriam’s House also takes in women who are mentally challenged. While many organizations shy away from the more highly diagnosed populations of women, Miriam’s House will take people who have bi-polar or schizophrenic disabilities, and will continue to work with them as long as they stay on their medications. Miriam’s House is not only about housing people, its programs will link them to all of the services that they need to sustain and better their lives, and the lives of their children. Resources include providing parenting skills, nutritional skills, educational links and daycare solutions.

“When women come to Miriam’s House, they don’t have an anchor,” Alex said. “They don’t have the tools or sophistication to navigate the social services system. We provide them with all of those things. We give them that anchor.”

Miriam’s House is equipped with trained, paid staff who are on-site on a 24/7 basis. The house staff of highly trained clinicians work with various populations, as at any time, Miriam’s House contains the dichotomy of both people with severe mental illness, and people with no mental illness. Miriam’s House remains a beautiful, clean haven because its residents invest in the environment. The women keep up the house through their different requested chores. It is a healing activity, which also teaches them the aesthetic uplifting value and pride of keeping a clean, neat home. In addition, each woman pays 30 percent of their income, however small, toward rent. This, too, encourages their personal investment.

“Do you know what ‘free’ means to people? It means: ‘Not worth anything,’” Alex said. “Clinical research shows that when you charge somebody something, they’re more invested. It becomes ‘theirs.’ The staff of Miriam’s House doesn’t own it: It is a nonprofit owned by the public at-large.”

When women arrive at Miriam’s House to live, there are three ways they can be a success. The first is by getting a GED and getting their lives on track through educational means.

“I have four out of eleven women that are pursuing their GED’s,” Alex said. “I could have just had women come and require them to get any job, like at McDonald’s or anywhere, but these women came to us and said: ‘I want to get my high school education – I’m finally in a place where I’ve got the time to do that.’”

The second way to success is for the women at Miriam’s House to obtain full-time employment. Finally, for those who are not going to return to work because of mental impairment or a medical condition, they are required to get out into the community and volunteer.

“I am not going to have someone lose their Social Security just by getting a simple job for the sake of it. There’s nobody just sitting at Miriam’s House biding time. Our expectations are realistic—uphill, but doable! Every woman in there is going to do something. This is part of living in our society. They will get self-esteem through jobs, volunteering by giving back to their community, and interacting with other people,” Alex said.

Through the years, Miriam’s House has even been a good service touchstone for generational transitioning. For example, a woman in her 50s who is in the program right now may have a daughter who graduated from the program years ago when she was young and pregnant. These days, Miriam’s House is almost always at capacity because more and more women without children are trying to utilize it than in the past.

“I think that’s a reflection of the downturn in the economy,” Alex said. “We can house up to 28 children, but we never get near 28, because I will not turn down a woman because she doesn’t have children. There are rooms at Miriam’s House that aren’t fully utilized because maybe its resident doesn’t have children to put in the bunk-beds. I also won’t discriminate against women with older sons, adolescent boys. Some places do.”

Miriam’s House used to receive two-thirds of its funding from HUD (Housing and Urban Development), but now receives only 20 percent from it. HUD’s funding allows for the two-year treatment model. This is significant, and coupled with the tremendous cutbacks at Virginia’s state funding level, this has truly caused individual donors to be the backbone of today’s nonprofit organizations. The better that an organization is at asking and getting individual investments, the better it can sustain itself in this economy. Miriam’s House also acquires funding through Lynchburg City, individual investors, corporate support and foundation support.

Whatever the reasons for giving and whomever the source may be, Alex says that each financial gift they receive helps Miriam’s House continue to give its own gift to the women who seek its refuge.

“We have the gift of longevity, and we get a little bit better quality of employment for women thereafter,” Alex said. “It shows the sheer determination to change one’s life for the better. So that’s the kind of gift that Miriam’s House gives to Lynchburg.”