Open Every Door
Saving Grace NWA provides a beautiful place to call home, with opportunities to heal, grow, and connect, empowering generational change.
Imagine on your
18th birthday becoming homeless.
That's the reality facing many young women in Northwest Arkansas as they age out of foster care. No home. No safety net. No one to call.
Saving Grace NWA provides a beautiful place to call home, with opportunities to heal, grow, and connect, empowering generational change.
This year, your gift opens a door.
“I had nowhere to go but up,
so I did.”
Makayla, Saving Grace NWA Graduate
Dear Friend,
Imagine turning 18 and becoming homeless.
Now just imagine it’s Christmas.
Sadly, this is reality for many young women in Northwest Arkansas aging out of foster care. She doesn't have a safe and supportive community or even a place to call home.
At Saving Grace NWA, we have the sacred privilege of inviting these young women into a beautiful and safe place to call home on a farm in Centerton, AR. We walk alongside her as she takes her first steps through the front door.
Once inside, there are more doors, and each one becomes hope of something better than what she survived as a child.
There is the pantry door, where she learns to nourish herself and prepare for a home of her own. The bedroom door, where she has a space to rest, exhale, and begin to heal. And the barn door, opening wide to experiences building courage, grit, connection, and healing. Each door is an invitation to experience something she may not have been able to see as a possibility from where she stood before.
I have watched young women accept that invitation for 18 years and this January, Saving Grace NWA will turn 18. There is something especially meaningful to me about that number. Eighteen is the age when the world begins telling a young person, It’s time to make your own way. Welcome to adulthood, ready or not.
Makayla wasn’t ready and lacked solid footing to launch into adulthood with connection and stability. Before coming to Saving Grace NWA, she was exhausted simply from survival, walking miles to work and returned each day to a living situation that could crumble at any moment. Then she got the call: You’ve been accepted.
When Makayla arrived, she didn’t feel safe immediately due to years of instability that taught her to be guarded. Then she opened the door to her bedroom and what welcomed her there was more than her heart could have imagined, all prepared just for her. That door was just the beginning.
Over time, other doors began to open. Counseling gave Makayla a place to face the hard parts of her story. Relationships taught her she didn't have to do it alone. She worked, learned life skills, built credit, and eventually purchased a car on her own credit, with money she tucked away with every pay check. The young woman who had once walked miles to work could now drive herself there.
And then came another door. After graduating from Saving Grace NWA, Makayla woke up one morning in her own apartment. A home where she felt safe and this time she had the skills and resources to create that safety for herself. Today, Makayla has a home and family of her own. Looking back, she says:
“I had nowhere to go but up, so I did.”
This is what can happen when a young woman has the opportunity.
God's grateful girl,
Becky Shaffer Founder & Executive Director
Saving Grace NWA
