Breaking Cycles of Homelessness with Dignity: A Drake House Story

Our community is full of amazing nonprofits and programs, and The Drake House is one of them. A sanctuary for single moms and their kids, The Drake House seeks to be a launching pad for those in a season of homelessness to get back on their feet. 

President Nesha Mason is passionate about what The Drake House does — and for good reason! 

“The Drake House was started by a group of community leaders in 2006 after identifying a need for single mothers and their children to overcome a circumstance of homelessness with their dignity and family intact,” Nesha said. “That’s kind of my favorite part of the story because I love it when community leaders take matters into their own hands, pull together their own resources and work to make lives better for their neighbors.”

The Drake House offers a number of resources to the families that come to them for help. 

“We have 32 units of apartments; 15 are used for emergency housing for families. They’re fully furnished, and all bills are paid, so families are able to come into that program, save money for up to six months and really take a pause to get back on their feet,” Nesha said. 

“Then, if [the families] need a bit more time after those six months, they’re able to go to what we call The Drake Village. It is a transitional housing program. It’s kind of a next step where families are paying their own rent and utilities, so it is a way for them to reestablish their rental history.

“We have a third-party property manager who works with the families, and if they have a successful tendency at The Drake Village, they have the opportunity to rent from that partner without having to go through any ‘red tape.’”

As The Drake House provides for the physical needs of these families, the organization also seeks to create a space that promotes emotional and mental healing. 

“The Drake House helps families overcome not just the circumstance of homelessness but also the trauma of it, particularly for single moms because [as a mom] you have to be everything to your children in that role. It can be really deflating when you have, for whatever reason, found yourself in a space where you don’t know where you and your kids are going to lay your head,” Nesha said. 

“For us, our programming — as much as it is about housing — is about helping build [each] mom’s self-esteem back up so that she can be the leader of her family that she wants to be and that her children need her to be.” 

“[Our coordinators] develop a very personalized empowerment plan that plots the course for how each mom can get back on their feet. We’re not just looking at housing. We look at their whole wellbeing from a place of five pillars of family stability: physical and mental wellbeing, education and training, career and financial stability and of course housing.

“Many times, these moms may feel a little ostracized from the community, so we help bring them back in — and we get a tremendous amount of support from the six communities that make up North Fulton. It’s nice because not only are they a part of The Drake House community, but within that, there’s also much pouring from our neighbors all around this North Fulton area. So we’re really grateful for that.”

One of its community partners? The Community Foundation for Northeast Georgia.

The Drake House recently started its fund through the Community Foundation to help provide better care to its families. 

“We call it The Drake House Future Fund. As the economy has changed and the cost of living continues to increase, we recognize there are still solutions to be developed — and the biggest solution is affordable housing,” Nesha said.

“We know that we need more units, and we’re hopeful this will help us fund some of the expansion when that time comes..”

Ultimately, The Drake House recognizes that the community surrounding it — and the volunteers working directly with them — are key to developing an environment of love and healing for the families it serves. 

“I can’t say enough how much we appreciate the support of our community,” Nesha said. “The work we do here also wouldn’t be as successful or as heartfelt without our amazing team. We have a great team that works with the families. Everybody is putting this mission first, and I’m just really grateful for all the support systems that we have around this mission, board and partners.”

Because homelessness is so frequently a cyclical — and even generational — struggle, The Drake House doesn’t only focus on moms’ needs but also on the health of the children they bring with them. 

“While we’re working with the moms, we have youth programming to support their kids. So they get an opportunity in our afterschool program, which is completely free, to do all kinds of enrichments from yoga to dance to a Cub Scout troop on our campus,” Nesha said. 

The Drake House also saw a need to develop the teens in the families it serves, to help prepare them for adulthood themselves.

“Everybody wants to have that sense of belonging, so [we want to] create that environment here, not just for mom and littles, but for teens, too,” Nesha said. “We have a teen program for teens to get an opportunity to [help them] think, ‘Where am I going? What is my future going to look like?’ And then we align them, we set them up with some of those resources to help them move along that path.

“We’ve learned from our teens that if they’ve moved around a lot, they don’t feel comfortable exploring these opportunities at school. So if we can give them an introduction to it on our campus, then they’ll go into the high school and they can go into the program, where they’re feeling a little bit more informed.”

What drives Nesha’s passion for The Drake House?

“I really do believe everybody deserves to have an opportunity, a place to lay their head. I see how our society has gotten to a point where if you stumble — particularly financially — it is really hard to get back on your feet,” Nesha said. 

“14 million children are being raised by single mothers in our country; that’s a significant amount of our future that is being influenced and raised by single moms. And particularly for single moms, with any kind of misstep, it’s hard to overcome cycles of financial vulnerability that can become nearly insurmountable to overcome.

“And The Drake House, what drew me to it was the fact that you get to overcome that circumstance — because it really should just be a circumstance in your life. Not a pattern, not what defines you — but overcoming a circumstance of homelessness with dignity and your family intact. That is something that everybody should have the opportunity to do.

“I’m passionate about giving people that opportunity and trying to break that cycle of poverty. That’s what we seek to do.”It takes a village, and The Drake House has been blessed with an amazing one. Discover how you can be a part of it at thedrakehouse.org.