A roundtable conversation with two of our grantees discussing the necessity of shelter, security, and safety in housing.
McGowan Fund: Will you each tell me a little bit about yourself and your organization?
Courtney Thomas: I’m Courtney Thomas. I’m the CEO of Newhouse, which is Kansas City’s first and oldest domestic violence shelter. We have just over 100 beds. We’re located in the northeast area of Kansas City, where 85% of the crime that is prosecuted in Jackson County occurs. So, we are right where our community needs us most. We provide therapy and recovery services. We have a full legal team to help people navigate the complexities of orders of protection, divorce, and child custody cases. We also have a full-time early education center, a case management team, and a 24-hour hotline team on-site. We’re also moving into the offender space in 2026. If we aren’t healing the people doing the harm, the harm is never going to stop.
Shane Powers: I’m the president and CEO of NeighborWorks Northeastern Pennsylvania. We are a community development nonprofit located in Scranton, Pennsylvania, with a focus on creating and sustaining affordable housing. Some of our work is place-based traditional community development work, like community planning, but the majority of what we do is around home ownership, working with existing homeowners or prospective homeowners to help educate and prepare them for home ownership. We’re a HUD-certified housing counseling agency, and we work both in group settings and one-on-one with residents to establish budgets, reduce debt, improve credit scores, and manage down payments, and we offer closing cost assistance programs for income-qualified buyers. We also work with individuals who may be facing foreclosure and help them to understand and navigate that process. Finally, we do work with older adult residents to help them stay in their homes, providing safety modifications, small home repairs, and working on accessibility, like adding ramps, grab bars, and stair glides. We serve about a six-county region here in northeastern Pennsylvania.
McGowan: Both of your organizations offer different types of shelter, what does the word “shelter” mean to you?
CT: For us, shelter is twofold. It is meeting an immediate need, helping people trying to escape danger, and having a place that not only provides a bed, but also provides the services that reduces recidivism. We provide services that reduce the risk of a person returning to their abuser, or being unhoused, even returning to addiction. For us, shelter is more than a bed. It’s providing the supportive services that truly allow a person to stand stably on their own two feet and move toward economic mobility.
SP: I’d like to discuss our aging in place program, as McGowan has been such a champion of this work. Considering shelter is a natural output when you’re doing work with residents in their homes. It’s really kind of a triad type of approach for us; it’s us as the certified aging in place specialists, the occupational therapists we bring in, and the residents who all work together to assess what the needs are of the older adult. Our work is about respecting what their space is and what that means to them. We incorporate their pets too as the role that they play in creating a supportive network for that older adult is necessary; it’s the connection. Shelter is creating an environment that allows the resident to satisfy all of the goals they have. We do what we can to create shelter in whatever definition the resident has in mind.
CT: I agree Shane. We also work to keep pets with their owners. That comfort and stability is absolutely essential. One of the very first changes we made at Newhouse was allowing pets in the shelter, in the room with their people. 72% of people that end up in domestic violence shelters say they would have left their abuser sooner if they had a place for their pet to go.
McGowan: It seems like these small but important changes are what allows you to go beyond providing shelter to providing sanctuary. What does sanctuary mean to you?
SP: That word, to me, has at its core safety. It takes this idea of shelter, but it kind of creates more warmth, and it makes a space where people feel safe to be themselves. And I think that that is a real critical piece. One of our core values is meeting people where they’re at, understanding what an individual’s definition of sanctuary is. And I think that there’s this really beautiful intersection of the work that Courtney’s doing and the work that we’re doing about creating stability. Because stability is another piece in that. Housing shouldn’t have to be something that people are fighting for. It should be something that people feel is inherently a part of their right as an individual and their safety and security. Sanctuary is the refuge; it’s the place that you go at the end of a long day where you can feel comfortable. I think whether that’s home ownership, whether that’s a rental, whether it’s transitional, sanctuary is about creating an environment that allows people to truly feel whole.
CT: That was great, Shane. I wholeheartedly agree with what you said. I also want to emphasize on the sanctuary side of things, the safety component. It is critical that a sanctuary is a place where you feel physically safe, psychologically safe. I think that’s one piece that we really focus on. We want the people we help to say, “In this place and in this space, not only am I able to heal from what has happened to me, my forward trajectory has possibility because someone is believing in me in a way that perhaps I’ve never believed in myself.” We aim to create a place where a person can be themselves without judgment, without question. You’ll have good days, and you’ll have bad days when you are recovering from traumatic experiences. And I think all too often in organizations, there’s a one-strike-you’re-out mindset. That’s an expectation that no human being—even those who have not experienced trauma—can live up to 100% of the time. So, a sanctuary, to me, also has grace.
SP: I think that’s a really powerful idea. This conversation is enlightening for me because it really calls to home how multifaceted the word “safety” is. In the work that we’re both doing, we’re creating safe environments for people to call home. For us, we’re often working with people who have a leaky roof, don’t have heat, don’t have hot water, can’t get up the stairs. These individuals cannot thrive in their current situations in a way that allows for individual dignity. It’s striking to me to kind of hear this conversation evolve and think about what safety means on so many different levels to us as people.
CT: And I think we both said explicitly, but again, these ideas we’re discussing—safety, shelter, even sanctuary—these are basic needs. If that basic need isn’t met, how can anything else work for that person?
McGowan: Both of your organizations clearly benefit the individuals in need, but maybe you can share how your work helping the larger community as well?
SP: We do a lot of partnership work with local universities, and one of the projects that we are working on is helping older adults connect to technology. And so, we have created safety kits and smart home technology that we have college students actually going into the home to both install as well as provide training for. That could be a Ring doorbell or Alexa-enabled devices in the home. These are success stories beyond the added technology because our residents are getting the connection and we’re preventing social isolation that can damage an individual’s mental health. And I think the community as a whole benefits because the young adults who are working with the older adults are also experiencing the full breadth of what it means to be integrated in community.
CT: I think in the social services sector, in particular, there is this very rigid robotic framework—if this then that, every single time. Very cookie cutter, which dehumanizes a person. We are not robots. We really look at every individual’s needs and align that with our current resources or our current partnerships, or partnerships that we can build and create in community. We’re constantly evolving to create solutions for individuals or for problems we’re trying to solve. And we believe we have a responsibility to uplift the entire community. And if we can address the things that feed the cycle of abuse then violence will reduce on its own. We are in place to build a healthy community.
McGowan: Let’s talk a little bit about the challenges of running a nonprofit in 2025? Can you find hope even in the toughest moments?
CT: I can say that we lost $1.2 million in federal funding in March, which was a fifth of our budget. That was a gut punch in a way that funding loss hasn’t hit us before. Our team was able to make it up in 2025 through the generosity of the community. If we can be honest with the community about the things that we are experiencing, people really do want to help and they will step up. And I say that knowing how many people are struggling in their own homes. I’m a strong believer in hope, but it is scary to think about what’s ahead. I’m a person that never gives up hope, but we have had to get really creative in how we address and work to overcome some of these things. We’re being told that our Victims of Crime Act funding could be sliced by more than 60% in April.
SP: To Courtney’s point, we also sought alternative funding. We’ve had more conversations with philanthropic partners and really tried to understand how those partners could support us. I saw a lot of really creative solutions coming from philanthropy. It is hard to rally people in an environment where there is so much uncertainty, and we’ve spent a lot of precious energy trying to read between the lines, figure out what the next prevailing wind is going to be. I think about the foundations that we work with, both at a local and national level, and I think that people were incredibly supportive and really worked to support organizations like ours during these difficult and challenging times. I think, more than anything, that there was funding that we were anticipating that did not manifest, not on the philanthropic side, or on the federal funding side. It challenged us to figure out how we could continue to serve using other avenues. Do I maintain hope? Absolutely. One of the first things that I feel like we talked about as a team is that people, more than ever, need to know that organizations like ours—like the work Courtney does too—people need to know that we are here for them.
McGowan: Anything else you’d like to share with our readers?
CT: I think the thing that I want to impart is that even if you yourself have not experienced domestic violence, you can be assured that someone you love has. One in three women and one in four men will experience some form of domestic violence in their lifetime. For some folks, they think it’s on the periphery. But you have to think about your neighbor, your coworker, your sister, your cousin, and what people are experiencing behind closed doors. And you need to know that leaving isn’t always the safest answer for someone. My encouragement is for people to think about the ways that they can contribute to people being safe, to communities being safe, to people having the resources that they need. Consider volunteering and getting to know what the needs are in your community and giving back in some way. We all play a role in what tomorrow looks like, and I just encourage people to be a part of that. I’d also like to add that our McGowan funding has allowed us to do things both big and small like programmatic things and helping us afford added security, which allows us to ensure the safety of people on the inside. We are incredibly grateful for this assistance.
SP: Without the funding from the McGowan Foundation, we would not be able to support a strong team or the capacity and organizational operational needs of our organization. We are also so thankful. One of our core values is, “Home is where it all starts.” And I think that that’s a theme for both the work that we do here at NeighborWorks and the work that Courtney is leading. It’s really understanding that having a safe place—whether it’s a sanctuary, a home, a shelter—where individuals can heal their bodies and minds and connect with people in their community is a really important foundational element in the work that we do.