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Demographics | ||||
Michelle's Story
I graduated from Bunker Hill Community College with a 4.0 GPA. On November 14, 2002, I was inducted into Phi Theta Kappa (the national honor society of community colleges) and received my Bachelors Degree from Tufts University in 2004.
Today I have goals and dreams thanks to the support that I received at Brookview House. However, my life was not always this way. May 1, 2001 was both the worst day of my life and the best day of my life. It was the worst day because after nineteen years of marriage, my husband tried to kill me. That day was also the best day of my life because I found the courage to press criminal charges and to leave that abusive relationship.
I left a nine-room house and traveled over 400 miles with three of my four children and found safety at a domestic violence shelter in Boston. I learned that I could only stay there for three months and it was hard for me to find transitional housing in addition to having to find schools, doctors, and a source of income.
By chance, I met a woman who lived at Brookview House. She told me about the program and I knew that I had to get in. At the interview, I met the Case Manager and the Housing Specialist. My first impression was that they were tough but also very caring and compassionate. They both said they had certain expectations of the residents and that they would support me in every way they could.
After three months of living in one room at the domestic violence shelter, I had an apartment at Brookview House to share with my children. Even though it was a shelter and I was still homeless, I had a place to call home. I will never forget something that Diane Curry told me the day that I moved in. She told me that as long as I complied with the rules of the program and worked hard, when I left Brookview House it would be to move into a beautiful, safe, affordable apartment with a section 8 certificate. I held on to those words for the eleven months that I lived at Brookview House.
I knew I needed to earn a college degree so that I could make a better life for my family. One month after I moved in, the staff referred me to the One Family Scholarship program and I enrolled at Bunker Hill Community College. I decided to major in Nursing because I wanted to help people. However, after being at Brookview House for a few months I changed my major to Human Services and Psychology because of the wonderful examples I had from the women that work at Brookview House; women who are committed, supportive, caring, and strong. These women were my mentors.
Now that I am no longer homeless, I have a new dream. My dream is to develop a program modeled after Brookview House. The program will focus on women that are homeless because of domestic violence. It will provide support through workforce development, childcare, parenting classes, housing search, self esteem workshops, and educational counseling. Brookview House has helped to make my dream of having a home come true. But more than that, Brookview House has inspired my new dream and for this, I thank them. | ||||
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