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A Story of Success from Genesis Home: Helen's Story
June 21, 2011
Sometimes it makes all the difference in the world to be able to step back from our day-to-day lives, take a deep breath, and figure out manageable steps toward making the wrong parts right. When Helen Mangum found herself four months pregnant and in a dysfunctional living situation in New York in 2000, she did not have the luxury of perspective that would allow her to see a brighter future. “I didn’t know how to understand or appreciate anything,” she says. “I was in such a depression. Something inside was missing.”
But deep down, she knew she needed to make a change. So she got on a Greyhound bus with $100 and headed to her home state of North Carolina, where she had a contact at a church in Fayetteville. She asked God to help her make it.
Helen stayed at several homeless shelters, but she knew she needed more than the short windows of time they allowed to get her future in order. That’s when she found Genesis Home. She was assigned a case worker for therapy, counseling, and career support at Genesis Home – and had the privacy of her own apartment to spend time with her young son, Daniel. “Genesis Home had all the resources I needed and offered me relief from worrying about the necessities of life so I could give full attention to getting healthy and thinking about who I wanted to be,” Helen says.
Helen stayed at Genesis Home for 14 months. “It took that entire time to get to a sense of peace,” she says -- a peace she felt “for the first time ever.” She learned the importance of having goals and plans: “Knowing there was a possibility of coming out of poverty and pain gave me a whole new reason to live. I knew I could rise above my past.”
After her stay at Genesis Home, Helen opened her own hair salon, The Beauty Spot, in 2004, and began building a loyal clientele. Helen says that getting her business off the ground was not easy but, “through the support of my case worker at Genesis Home and a loan officer at Self-Help, I have learned a lot about money and finances.”
In October 2010, Helen was approved for a home loan. “Now I’m a homeowner and a business owner! My credit score is going up. I am so proud,” says Helen. Helen still visits Genesis Home to encourage others with her story. She says, “It can really happen. You can make a better life, be on the top and not always on the bottom.”
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