One morning in July, a Facebook post tagging Tedford Housing caught my attention. A woman I didn’t yet know wrote about her child, about surviving domestic violence and about the turning point she found eight years ago at Tedford’s family shelter. She ended her note by sharing that, now stably housed, she was grateful to be in a position to give back. Later that same day, a notification appeared in my inbox: a new recurring donation — from Sarah, the woman behind the post.

When I reached out to thank Sarah for her generosity, I also asked if she might be willing to meet for coffee and share more of her story. She agreed, and the following week, I found myself sitting across from her in a café in Lewiston.

Sarah told me about arriving in Maine one bitter January evening with her 13-year-old son. They had left a domestic violence situation on the West Coast, and the recent loss of her mother left her reeling. She had no support system, no one who understood the reality of the marriage she was leaving and a teenager depending on her completely. The housing she had lined up in Maine had fallen through, and the last of her money had been spent on plane tickets.

That evening, luggage trailing behind them, they wandered into a church in Brunswick simply seeking warmth and a moment to catch their breath. The pastor noticed the exhaustion on their faces and listened to Sarah’s story. He stayed with her while she made calls to Tedford’s family shelter, ordered a pizza for her and her son, and helped them secure a hotel room for the first few nights in Maine.

Two weeks later, Sarah and her son moved into one of Tedford’s family shelter units. Relief washed over her as her son’s eyes widened at the snow outside, and they spent hours building snowmen in the yard. Sarah navigated part-time job applications, filled out rental paperwork and applied for disability benefits for the first time, while her case manager listened and validated her experience with an autoimmune disease. By mid-March, they moved into an apartment in Bath, a crucial step toward stability.

Flipping through her phone, Sarah showed me pictures of the snowmen beside the same playground structure that still stands outside the shelter. She paused for a long moment before continuing.

“I’d love to say I’ve been stable for the last eight years after you guys got me into that apartment in Bath, but that’s not the truth,” she said quietly. “I’ve missed rent, run out of food, ended up in more bad relationships.” The years that followed were lonely and difficult, navigating grief, trauma and a new state without a support system. Both her physical and mental health suffered, and she made choices she likely wouldn’t make today.

Now, Sarah describes herself as “thriving.” She is entering her second year in a lease in Lewiston, graduating from a one-year Safe Voices case management program, taking adult crafting classes at the library and rediscovering her sense of style. For the first time since she was a young girl, she makes choices about her appearance entirely for herself, buying green polka-dot dresses, dyeing her hair bright red, and decorating her cane with tiny rainbow gems. She says these small acts of self-expression are her way of reclaiming agency, asserting her independence and celebrating the person she has become. Her apartment mirrors that spirit: bright, colorful and entirely her own. Looking back, Sarah says the woman who flew into Maine eight years ago would not recognize herself today, and she is proud of that.

Just before I said goodbye, Sarah told me about the list she had kept over the years, a record of every person, every agency and every act of kindness that had helped her and her son. Now she was quietly paying it forward, donating to Tedford, to Safe Voices and to the church that had helped her secure a hotel that first night in Maine. Tedford was one of the first on that list, part of the foundation that helped her take the next step, and the next, and the next.

“It felt like Tedford was the place where things began to turn around for me all those years ago,” she said. “The case manager at the shelter taught me the tools to get back on track when things got hard again. Whenever I stumbled, I knew how to pick myself up and keep moving forward for my son. I did it once, so I knew I could do it again.”

Katrina Webster is a development and communications associate at Tedford Housing, a Brunswick-based emergency shelter serving the Midcoast. Giving Voice is a weekly collaboration among four local nonprofit service agencies to share information and stories about their work in the community.