- So each year here in Los Angeles,
there are about 5,000.
This is staggering by the way,
this statistic is staring about 5,000 pregnant women
with no place to call home.
What my next guest is doing her best to help.
She runs Harvest Home,
which changes lives one expectant mama at a time,
take a look.
(bright upbeat music)
- Harvest home is a residential program
for homeless pregnant women,
that equips women to become great mothers.
Here at our home in Venice, we have 10 beds,
but we get over 500 calls a year.
Still they're only 70 beds in the entire county
for homeless pregnant women.
So thousands of women are going without support.
(upbeat music)
- After living in a van for nine months,
I hadn't felt safe or really felt like loved by anyone.
Harvest Home gave me that, gave us that.
(upbeat music)
- Over the last 35 years,
we've served over 600 families in this home.
(upbeat music continues)
- I was homeless and I was scared, lonely,
lost, Harvest Home really changed my life
and they really helped me out when I needed it.
(upbeat music)
- What is more essential than a safe place to call home
or that foundational relationship between a new mother
and her newborn baby.
Harvest Home is absolutely essential
to the families we serve and to our community.
(bright upbeat music) (crowd clapping)
- No doubt Sarah Wilson is a Rad Human.
(bright upbeat music) (crowd cheering and clapping)
- Alright, well Sarah is 20 years now,
give it a clap on her.
(siren, audience cheering and clapping)
- So welcome in, Sarah meet Hannah.
[Sheila and Hannah] - Hi
- So tell us more about
how this got started in the women you serve.
- So Harvest home has been serving women
for 35 years out of a home in Venice,
right near Venice Beach.
We've served over 600 families in that time.
And we're at home where women can come in
when they're pregnant, get back on their feet.
And these women are coming from all different walks of life,
but what they have common in common is this experience
of going through pregnancy without somewhere to go.
So women that might have, you know domestic..
- That's terrifying. - And it is terrifying.
- Yeah, - Right?
- It's only terrifying . - You're already emotional.
There's so much going on.
You're building a central nervous system.
There's a lot happening.
- Yeah and you're growing a human.
- Yeah, yep - Yes. Yeah.
So dealing with domestic violence or substance abuse,
mental health, you know, challenges.
We have so many women who walked through our doors who are,
aging out of the foster system
and don't have anywhere to go.
And so we are that place where they can come
and can find a warm home
where they can get their feet back under them.
- Wow. All right.
You're familiar with Harvest Home right here. Right?
- I am, I am.
I've attended several events
and the people that are running
it that work there are amazing, all the volunteers.
It takes a lot of volunteers.
So it's just an amazing place, people who care,
and just to think that somebody would have a safe place
to go and nurture there..
- By the time You need to be nurtured.
- Yeah.
- Yeah. So what you're doing is amazing.
- Thank you. - Yeah, it really is.
(crowd clapping)
- So you did more than just housing though, right?
- Yes. So we are a full program that I kind of call it,
mommy boot camps sometimes that were geared towards helping
a woman prepare holistically for becoming a mom.
And so we have classes and they have case management.
We have a therapist on our staff team
and really the program
is tailored to every woman's situation.
And then the women connect,
they're all going through the same thing together.
So they become this community of support for one another.
And as Sheila mentioned,
we have over 150 volunteers each year.
So they become a part of our community as well.
- Wow. That's an amazing thing too,
for a lot of those women that might they're already
their lives already kind of hard enough,
anybody that has postpartum on top of that,
like happening around that time to have that network
of women to lean on. - Yeah.
- That's incredible. - Yes, absolutely
- Wow.
- Moreso, you said that the women typically leave
by the time their baby is six months.
So what happens after that?
- Yeah, so after women graduate from our program,
when their babies are about six months old,
they typically go into their own housing on their own
or maybe another transitional program.
But then we have an alumni program.
So we get to continue to walk with women,
helping provide resources like diapers and wipes,
but then also just coaching
and support through case management.
And we have groups and events to pull women back
together as well.
And what I love is getting to watch the families grow
and these babies grow up
and I've only been with the organization eight years,
but we have alumni who are 25 years old.
We had a young man who came and volunteered.
He's six, five now.
And he was born at Harvest Home.
Another young.... - What!
- Yeah, it's crazy, right?
23 years old and to think that weird.
- That's so great.
- His life that started in our home.
A young man graduated from Stanford last year
and sent us his graduation announcement
and said, thanks so much for giving me a start.
- Oh my God.. (group chattering)
- Yeah. (crowd clapping)
- And you know what, we've had there's such a need for help,
especially with mothers.
And there's so many, God, you can look on the streets here
in LA and there are so many children,
there's so many children, parents don't know what to do.
Like it's, there's just so much homelessness happening here.
So the fact that there's a place where people can go
and get help and in a time when they really, really need it.
And maybe that's the moment
that really turns everything around
and changes the trajectory.
It's a really incredible thing what you all are doing.
- Thank you. (crowd clapping)
And my next guest is living proof y'all,
she came to Harvest Home when she was down and out,
and now she and her little one are flourishing, meet Alex.
Everybody say hi. (crowd cheering and clapping)
You look beautiful. - Thank you.
- I love Red, so this is Sherrilyn Hannah.
And of course you know Sarah,
- Hi. - Hi.
- Y'all go back.
Take us back to how you were even introduced
to this program.
- Yeah, so I was actually an on the road sales rep
and I was selling to hospital gift shops, boutiques casinos.
And I was actually, it was a really isolating job for me.
I was traveling miles away from my house,
not in touch with family and friends.
And I was doing really good business with the casinos
that they started to give me free comp plays,
complimentary night stays.
And what turned into...
What started as a fun gambling,
to decompress turned into a pretty horrible addiction.
And within three months of that,
I actually lost my entire savings.
I took out personal loans
and was in $48,000 to $52,000 in debt.
And that was in three months. - Wow.
- So yeah, that's kind of what started it.
And once that kind of took place, I panicked,
I met someone at the casino
and he was an addict and he was using
and I started using as well.
And that was in 2018.
And it was at that point that my life went south.
I lost my job. I went back to my apartment.
I packed up everything I could to fit into my car.
And I went up north to go live with this random guy
that I had just met and use and gamble with him
for a long time, about a year of my life.
And you know, what's crazy about my story
is that I came from a great background.
I have two loving parents, a sister,
I graduated high school, graduated college,
not in a million years, did I ever think something
like this could have happened to me, but of course
life had been wounded.
The light at the end of the tunnel really
is the fact that my family ended up staging
an intervention for me in December of 2018.
And I went home for that.
And it was that same night that I went back
to my sister's house.
Something felt off with my body and I was like,
I need to take a pregnancy test.
And I took one and it was the moment
that I saw those two pink lines.
That was the moment I grew up.
And I was like, I gotta get my act together.
So I agreed to rehab and I did the counseling.
I did everything, and then I realized that
if I really wanted to do this whole single mom thing,
figure out my life, I needed to find someplace
that would give me a second chance.
And that's when I found Harvest Home.
- That's amazing. (crowd clapping)
- You have got to read this book called 'Untamed'
by Glennon Doyle.
- I'll write it down. I need to.....
- I'm telling you,
it's gonna be a great book for you.
It healed me, helped me all the things,
but just even your story,
how you're talking, it's just,
everybody always thinks that they're invincible
and it can't touch my family
because I'm from this background, like,
nobody expects anyone.
It can happen to anyone.
Anyway, It's a really great book. 'Untamed'.
- Untamed, alright.
- Harvest Home was life-changing for you, right?
You ended up finding that help, right?
- Yeah. Harvest Home, It didn't just save me.
It saved my daughter too.
They really cater to around that individual.
So they had group therapy, therapy
for me personally, it was like financial literacy.
I had to get a grasp on the amount of debt I was in
trying to build up my credit score,
infant development programs,
like, I really wanted to breastfeed my child.
So they had a lactation consultant come every day
for an hour to make sure that I was
a confident woman feeding my child.
Like they just helped me in so many different areas.
And in August is when I had my daughter, Rory,
I ended up getting stable housing.
I got a studio right after from Harvest Home.
And I just knew deep down,
like I needed to figure out what life was going to be like.
And I wanted to have purpose in my career and my job,
I wanted to have it have so much meaning.
And so I reached out to Sarah,
like the month after I kind of graduated from Harvest.
And I was like, is there a job opening up?
Like, is there anything?
And her first response was
we don't actually allow residents to work
after the first six months.
So, six months and one day came around and I emailed Sarah.
Hey, is there a job opening up?
- I love it. Persistent.
- And I... Really persistent. For about a year, I think.
- It was during the pandemic. - Yes
- You graduate, you graduated, right?
- So, yeah. And then August..
- Like everyone was looking for a job, right?
(laughter)
- And then August, this year,
August came around and Sarah reached out
and they had a job opening up as operations coordinator.
So I went in for an interview
and I started working at Harvest Home,
as operations coordinator. (crowd clapping and cheering)
- And what an amazing thing.
It's amazing what Sarah's doing,
but it's a really amazing thing to do,
you've done because no one can help you do that.
At the end of the day, you have to be the one to do that.
And that's the hardest thing, you know?
Well, Sarah you're working on expanding
Harvest Homes, right? - We are.
So you shared those astounding numbers
of the need in Los Angeles and..
- So sad. - It is, i mean,
we get over 500 calls a year alone
and can currently serve about 25 women a year.
And so about five years ago,
we started on this journey towards expansion and thought,
what would it look like to open a second home
to serve more women?
And out of the blue, about a couple of years ago,
we got a call from the Los Angeles Catholic archdiocese
and they said, "Hey, we have this convent,
these nuns that recently returned to Ireland
and we have this property.
Would you guys be interested in opening a second location?"
And by the way, maybe that's something we should talk about.
But, yeah, so of course,
just a few months before the pandemic
we started this process of opening this new homes
that we've been in the process of raising $4 million
to renovate this great old property,
but that has great bones, but needs a lot of work
to prepare for the women that are going to be there.
And yeah, just a few months we'll be opening up
and we'll be able to triple our capacity in serving.
(crowd clapping and cheering) - That's so cool.
- We love what you're doing.
It's remarkable what you're doing
and we definitely want to see Harvest home grow.
So we're gonna give you $10,000 just to help out.
(crowd cheering and clapping) - Thanks.