Otis’s Story
Thanksgiving is coming fast. As a chef at the Milwaukee Rescue Mission, the holiday season is one of the busiest times of the year for me, and I’ve got a lot of work to do between now and then. But no matter how busy we get, I always take time to remember just how…
Alesha’s Story
I never thought something like that could happen to me. I never saw it coming. I really didn’t think he was that kind of guy. But he was. About a year and a half ago, I was dating a man. He seemed nice enough. Then one night, he broke into my apartment. He beat…
Rodney’s Story
I spent much of my life caught up in anger, self-pity and bitterness toward a world I thought rejected me. But all along, I was really just a hurt little boy. At a young age, I was taken from my mother and placed in foster care. But no one ever told me why. Why…
Shamika’s Story
“My life was crazy growing up,” says Shamika, who came to Joy House pregnant and feeling lost. “There were nine of us kids. There was no child abuse, but there was stuff going on with my parents, and we got put in foster care when I was 11.” Despite the chaos she experienced at…
Eric’s Story
In a way, Eric wore a mask almost all his life. “I learned pretty early how to talk, act, dress, and look like a good Christian,” he says. “But it was just a mask. And by high school, I had enough. So I rebelled, left God behind, and went looking for a good time.”…
Dakara’s Story
“As a teenager, I was angry, confused, afraid and full of self-doubt,” says Dakara, a 22-year-old single mother with three children at Joy House. “There was no love in my family. You couldn’t call it a home. I didn’t have a father in my life, and I experienced a lot of abuse. There were a…
Mike’s Story
Mike will never forget the day his youngest daughter called him and said, “Dad, you love drugs more than you love us. You’ve got to get help.” “That just ripped me up,” he recalls. So in March 2018, he came to the Milwaukee Rescue Mission to get the help he needed. But it would not be…
Alicia’s Story
Alicia needed a new beginning, a chance to start over. She’d already been knocked down several times in her life, but she always found a way to get back up before. Now, at the age of 56, her past was catching up to her. “My childhood was really messed up,” she says. “There was…
Jenise’s Story
Jenise vividly remembers that day in 2015: She was riding a bus, overwhelmed with fear and hopelessness. She had been diagnosed with uterine cancer, and she didn’t know if she would survive. And what would happen to her 10-year-old daughter? Then she saw him — a complete stranger moving directly toward her. “I was…
Roscoe’s Story
I was angry. I was enraged at a world that was too strict, a world with too many unfair rules — a world that didn’t treat me the way I felt I deserved. I grew up in a poor rural family that worked the fields of Mississippi. My stepfather would never let me go…
