Fast forward 12 years.
This picture is the very first ‘Vision Board Meeting’ for the H.O.M.E. Center of Asheville!
The attendees were my mother, my stepfather, and myself. This was the first initial footwork put into making the dream a reality, and I can state without a shadow of a doubt that I had no idea how much work it would actually take.
I began seeking advice in the form of mentorship. SCORE is a nationwide nonprofit organization that offers such services to those interested in all sorts of business ventures. They became a ‘go-to’ source for questions and guidance as the dream of what was to come continued to grow.
In between work and parental responsibilities, I worked on my business plan. I developed programmatic services based on ideas and needs I noticed within my community. I would finetune these until all potential conflicts were covered by a solution. I even visited an uncle in North Hollywood, CA to meet with him and his colleagues to learn the basics from fundraising all the way to how they ran their respective organization’s operations. H.O.M.E. began to be the focal point of my daydreaming and dreams when I slept.
This continued until July of 2014 when God opened the doors for a major change that would alter my life and path.
On July 21st, 2014, I left Charlotte, NC in desperation to begin my current journey of recovery elsewhere. I wound up in the mountains of Western North Carolina, unsure of what the future held, but determined not to return to the past.
Though my life changed drastically, I continued to work on my dream and during a grant writing course, I pitched my idea to the instructor. He was impressed but had one suggestion: that the program be implemented into an in-treatment setting. This is when my knowledge of sober living and the impact it had on the Western North Carolina region increased. There are a multitude of options that include: long-term facilities, halfway houses, 3/4 houses, oxford houses, locations for domestic abuse survivors, others for recently incarcerated individuals. If there was a population to serve, there was a sober living option for them.
I made the necessary changes to H.O.M.E.’s programming and in 2017 after purchasing a property, I opened the H.O.M.E. Center for Men.
The journey had begun.