Stepping in and out of a bathtub. Climbing a flight of stairs. Getting to the grocery store. For most of us, these are small things. About one in four people we serve at Grandma’s House of Hope is a senior. Fatima Torres, Women’s Bridge Housing Program Manager, says their path to housing looks different, and so does the care it takes to get them there. “Part of self-sufficiency is not just doing things on your own,” Fatima says. “It’s also planning for meeting those

A year ago, Donna was in a wheelchair. Today, at 57, she walks the halls of her Grandma’s House of Hope home on her own two feet. “I feel like I’m walking like a crab,” she laughs. Maybe so. But she’s walking. Donna arrived last November from a large shelter in a converted hotel, using a walker and carrying the weight of deep depression.

Somewhere along the way, many of us absorb a quiet myth: that starting over belongs to the young. That after a certain age, the story is mostly written. At Grandma’s House of Hope, we see the opposite every day. About one in four of the people we serve are seniors, and many arrive carrying years of hardship. What they find here is a simple truth: a new chapter can begin at any age.

When our graduates walked the stage this fall, they did it under the roof of Friends Church Orange. That evening was made possible by The Hub OC, a partner whose heart beats in rhythm with ours. "It was a rocking time," says Cameron Gehringer-Pate, Director of Development for The Hub OC. The Hub OC serves people experiencing homelessness and crisis across Orange. Its Hub Resource Center offers meals, showers, laundry, and mail services six days a week, with case managemen

Ask anyone who lives or works in a Grandma's House of Hope home, and they'll tell you: some of the best teachers here don't have a job title. They're the seniors at the kitchen table, the ones who've seen enough of life to know what matters. Here are a few of the lessons they share every day.

Our name has always promised a place where you're welcomed, fed, and known. For about one in four of the people we serve, that promise lands close to home: they're grandmothers and grandfathers themselves. Seniors make up about 25% of our participants. Many raised families and cared for aging parents of their own. Then a rent increase, a hospital stay, or the loss of a spouse took away the only stability they'd known. Some find themselves without a home for the first time

Before Luis Jimenez managed four homes and a team of housing navigators, he was living on the streets himself, caught in the grip of alcohol and substance use, watching his life come apart. "Life was going upside down," he says. Sobriety, family, and a second chance came slowly, through what he calls the grace of God. He got sober. He found his way back to his wife and kids. And then, when he wanted to give back, Grandma's House of Hope found him.

This isn't Vanessa’s first time without a place to call home. The second time she found herself homeless, she also found Grandma's House of Hope, and she says the difference wasn't just getting housed. It was everything around it. "They've been there for me," she says. She lives with mental health challenges, and at her last shelter, that meant managing it alone. At Grandma's House of Hope, staff made sure she stayed on top of her medication, her psychiatrist appointment

Andrew spent most of his life keeping to himself and getting the job done. A Navy veteran and longtime tow truck operator, he built his days around discipline long before he ever needed a program to teach it to him. But discipline doesn't protect you from everything. When his landlord canceled his lease with a month's notice, Andrew found himself packing his life into his car and parking it on the beach in Dana Point.

It started with a Mother's Day brunch. Back in 2021, as the world was still finding its footing after COVID, Kim saw a call for volunteers: Grandma's House of Hope needed people to provide brunch for the women in its care. She thought of her friends, a dozen women from different backgrounds with nothing in common except their friendship with Kim. They gathered in her backyard, put together food trays, and delivered brunch to two Grandma’s House of Hope homes.

In conversations about unhoused populations, mental health and substance use are often talked about as if they're two separate problems, two boxes on an intake form, two referrals to two different specialists. In practice, they rarely show up separately. They experience one life, one set of days, in which both are present at once, often feeding each other in ways that are hard to untangle from the outside and and even harder to untangle from the inside.

Recently, the City of Orange arrested 69 people while clearing homeless camps near Hart Park. It's part of a much larger pattern across Orange County: since the Supreme Court's Grants Pass v. Johnson ruling cleared the way for cities to enforce anti-camping laws, jurisdictions from Anaheim to Santa Ana have leaned hard into sweeps, citations, and jail bookings. Transient bookings into county jails are up more than 40% since 2022.

As Program Manager for several men's programs at Grandma's House of Hope, Bernard Kelly oversees several tracks, including the Men’s Bridge Re-Entry Program, which serves participants coming directly out of incarceration. They arrive through our partnership with Project Kinship, an organization that works inside the prison and jail system to prepare people for release. Project Kinship offers trauma-informed care, therapy, and job development. What it does not offer is a pla

Three months ago, Scott was living in a sober living home, waiting for a spot at Grandma's House of Hope. Substance abuse had landed him in jail, and when he got out, he was homeless. Then the call came.

When Bobby walked out of custody, he didn't have a plan. He had a name: Project Kinship. Through that partnership, he found his way to Grandma's House of Hope's Men’s Re-Entry Bridge Housing Program, transitional housing for men re-entering the community after incarceration. He expected a place to sleep. What he found was something closer to a foundation.

Josephine Jacobs found Grandma's House of Hope the way a lot of people find the things that end up mattering to them: she was looking for something else entirely. As a college student interested in the nonprofit sector, she started searching for local organizations where she could get hands-on professional experience. She wasn't looking for us specifically. But when Grandma's House of Hope came up in her search, something about it stopped her scrolling.

For many men leaving incarceration, the hardest part isn't serving the sentence — it's what comes after. No address to put on a job application. No family willing or able to take them in. No clear path back into a community that often hasn't made room for them. Grandma's House of Hope is working to change that story, one home and one relationship at a time.

Picture what it takes to walk back into the world after decades away. Not just finding a job or a place to sleep — relearning how to pay for groceries, how to run a household, how to trust that the people around you have your back. The paperwork and the programming matter. But by itself, none of it is enough. What actually gets a person through that first year home is someone standing next to them who won't walk away.

Just days after learning we'd been awarded a generous grant from the Samueli Foundation, we received more wonderful news: Grandma's House of Hope has been selected to receive a Neighborhood Grant from The Starbucks Foundation — nominated by local Starbucks partners (employees) right here in our own community.

We wanted to share something that has our whole team feeling hopeful and grateful, because we know you will feel it too. Grandma's House of Hope has been named a recipient of the Samueli Foundation's Breakaway Fund, an investment in our mission. This is more than a grant. It is a new partnership built on shared values, and we could not be more honored.