Pivotal People
Join us in conversations with inspiring people doing amazing things. Their insights and experiences help motivate all of us to find our purpose that fits with our abilities, gifts and life situation. Get a "behind the scenes" look at successful people making a difference in the world and benefit from their advice for the rest of us. Our guests include authors, artists, leaders, coaches, pastors, business people and speakers.
Pivotal People
Lisa Steven: Empowering Teen Moms Through Hope and Faith
Lisa Steven is the author of A Place To Belong, a book that shares the miracle of Hope House while encouraging women in their leadership journey. A former teen mom, Lisa is committed to empowering teen moms in her community and across the world.
Lisa has more than 28 years of experience working with teen moms. In 2003, she co-founded Hope House Colorado and has served as the founder & executive director ever since. Under her leadership, Hope House received the Governor’s Service Award for Outstanding Nonprofit Organization in Colorado. Lisa co-authored the Teen MOPS Handbook and worked with MOPS International on their strategic plan for expanding the ministry of Teen MOPS.
Learn more and connect with Lisa:
https://hopehousecolorado.org/
https://www.linkedin.com/in/lisa-steven-54b48a10/
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I'd like to welcome Lisa Steven to the Pivotal People podcast. She's written a book, so she's an author, and she's also the director of a program called Hope House Colorado the founder and the director. So let me start out telling you about Lisa. She started working with teen moms in 1997 through Teen Mops that's the organization Mother of Preschoolers and in 2003, she co-founded Hope House Colorado and she has served as the founder and executive director ever since. So now your next question is what's Hope House? Well, let me tell you, hope House Colorado provides free self-sufficiency programs to parenting teen moms in three key areas. The Empower program provides opportunities for personal, educational and economic self-sufficiency for teen moms. They also have educational assistance, career planning, all kinds of relationship classes. They do so many things to equip teen moms to be good and mature mothers with the basis of faith.
Speaker 1:So I read Lisa's book. It's called A Place to Belong the True Story of a Teen Mom, a Humbling Leadership Journey and A House Called Hope. And I forgot to tell you that Lisa herself was a teen mom. So I read this book. Before we started. I said you know, lisa, we're going to talk about the specifics of your story, but what I love about her story and what I hope all of you hear is it doesn't matter what the specific project is. If one person has a passion for something in the world that they want to change, they just see something they don't think it's right or a group of people they really want to help. You don't have to have money or extra time. There is a way Lisa Steven has done something amazing even though she didn't have a pile of money or a lot of extra time. So that's enough of me talking, lisa. I would love for you to tell us a little bit about first your personal story. Take us back to was it 1986 when you became a mother?
Speaker 2:yourself. Stephanie, thank you so much for having me here today. It's a joy to be with you and your listeners. Yes, I love what you're saying. That is the whole hope and point of the book that one person who is completely not qualified in any way to do something major and big, or even. Sometimes I think we shortchange ourselves and even if it's something smaller, we think who, me, I'm not able or I don't have what it takes. And if we just trust God in whatever it is that he's called us to, big or little, he will literally surround you with the most amazing people to make that happen, to make that calling a reality.
Speaker 2:And for me, I was my husband and I became teenage parents when we were 17. We got pregnant and got married. I was still in braces, so all my wedding pictures are like this closed mouth smile because I thought I'd look older if I didn't show my braces during my wedding photos, which is really hysterical looking back now. And here's my husband in his 1980s mullet. And we've been married 38 years now and have three grown children and three just adorable, beautiful little granddaughters and just really adore getting to spend time with them.
Speaker 2:It's sort of the reward, as they say, for all of the hard years of parenting and you know, I did not set out to open a home for teenage moms. I thought that when my kids went to school, that I would go to college and that I would be a teacher, maybe, or an administrator. But it turned out God had a different plan and I began working with teenage moms as a volunteer through Teen Mops, or now MomCo They've changed their name to the MomCo and became really familiar, even though I was a teenage mom. I grew up with, or I mean I married into a family that gave us a lot of support, and the teenage moms we were working with at Teen Mops did not have that.
Speaker 2:These moms then back in the 80s and now still today, who I work with today, unfortunately live in really difficult circumstances Lots of domestic violence, lots of addiction in their family members, oftentimes homelessness, a lot of moving around from place to place. And back in the late 90s we just there wasn't anything there was no home for. And actually still today, hope House is the only residential program in the state of Colorado that will accept a 16 or 17 year old who is already parenting. So we just we felt like something had to be done. These moms were trying so hard and wanted to be a good mom in the worst way and had literally no examples and no safe place to live to meet their dream and their goal of creating a more stable life for their little one.
Speaker 1:So you started out by having kind of a mother's group just meeting at someone's house or meeting at the church Yep, at the church. So it was just a weekly group where you had childcare for their kids and you taught, you know lessons and small group and community. They became a community with each other, like small groups at our church, and from there you said, okay, I see a need here, as you just described. So then what was the next step? So you just went out and got a bank loan and bought a multi-million dollar campus. No, that's not how it works. No, that's not that easy.
Speaker 2:That's how I thought it would work, that's what I asked for and it did not happen that way. So God, in his wisdom, he knows that. I think that God is just, he's all about community. He builds us for relationship with one another and he owns all the cattle on a thousand hills. If he wanted to give us, you know, a million dollars to go buy something back then in 2003, when we opened, he could have done that. But that's not how it happened at all.
Speaker 2:We have a crazy miracle story that you can read in the book of how we just had this deep and intense call on our heart to do something for these moms and literally and maybe it just helped that I was so naive I never got the chance to go back to college I still haven't or to college at all. I never even started college. Literally. My background, I tell people, is I worked at JCPenney's and I did home daycare. So I still don't know how to type even today. My teenage moms make fun of me because I henpeck, but I'm a very fast henpecker. I in no way was qualified for this call and when God said, hey, I think someone should start a home for teenage moms, I was literally looking around me, like what? Who me? Like you must have the wrong person. And today, where we are now, today, we're at the point where we have affiliates opening in other parts of the country and almost always that is the same story. We have a hairdresser in northern Colorado that's like who me, god, you want me to open a home for teenage moms. Or a Young Lives leader in Orange County, california. Who's like who me? You want me to open a home for teen moms? It really exemplifies how God chooses the least qualified and then equips them the way that he promises to do.
Speaker 2:And so the next step for us honestly, we were naive enough to just start telling everybody who would let us come talk to them that we were going to open a home for teen moms. So we would speak at rotary groups and little small groups from churches and Bible studies and mops groups and just whoever would have us, and tell them that, hey, we're going to open a home for teen moms. And little by little, we'd get one introduction who'd introduce us to another introduction. And it was a long process. We did a lot of research along the way about what this home for teen moms should look like and looked at a lot of models, what were other people doing, so we didn't reinvent the wheel and finally, one day one of those gentlemen that we had met, who'd been an introduction from an introduction, called us up and said hey, we have a home that we are eventually going to tear down, but for now you can move into it and get your home for teenage moms started, and you'll probably have about two to three years in that space before we have to tear the house down to build townhomes, which is what they plan to do with their property. And it just was.
Speaker 2:It was that first miracle, that beginning miracle, to be given that opportunity just because we told people, we spread the word. And he remembered that and he often jokes we got our house because we gave him homemade brownies. So anytime someone would have a meeting with us, we would make homemade brownies and deliver them. So David always jokes that that's how we got the house. But it was miracle after miracle from there that the house was. Eventually that exact house was donated to us by this development company with the provision that we pick it up and move it off of the property it sat on because they were developing that into townhomes. We eventually were donated a piece of land by a church in Arvada, colorado, to move that house to, and it literally was an old-fashioned barn raising from there. I didn't know what a capital campaign was, never heard of it. We had a volunteer project manager who would call me up and tell me you need 14 four-foot egress window wells.
Speaker 2:And I would say what is that, how do you spell it and who do you call to get it? And he would give me some name and I would call up White Cap Industries and they would say, like just miraculously, like oh, we just had an order for those canceled. We'll be happy to donate those to you and deliver them to your project site. And so, literally, that house was moved to a new piece of land and from the digging of the basement to the roof it was an old-fashioned barn raising. The whole community came together to build that house.
Speaker 1:It was an amazing story. I would recommend your book to anyone because you really do take us through the details, which is nice because it's so easy to gloss over. What are we looking at 20 years of work and say, yeah, it started out as a house with you know I don't know, I'm making this up 10 or 12 bedroom home? It started out with a 12 bedroom home and now we have you know, hundreds of teen moms are served from our campus. Yeah, end of story.
Speaker 1:No, take us through the story, because when we hear your story, what I'm hearing is, if you have a burning desire to make a change in the world, it's going to take a little effort. You might not have money, but you could probably make brownies and guess what? All those civic organizations and all of those church groups. You're just sharing your heart. You're just sharing your heart with these groups. It inspires other people. You don't know how many people were inspired to go on to start their own, whether it was big or small. Those people heard your message and they said wait, I care about this. I'm going to do this at the school, I'm going to do this in my church, I'm going to do this in my community. That's number one and then number two. You had no way of knowing that someone would hear your story and they would come out of the blue and make that donation. And when you say it's amazing, a miracle for him, do you know the joy he experienced when he gave you that house?
Speaker 1:that would have been destroyed otherwise, so many good things that come out of you're asking for help. You know I had a project 24 years ago and I went around asking for help and I later learned the people who stepped forward to help also were blessed because they had an opportunity to make a difference. They got to be part of the story.
Speaker 2:So never apologize.
Speaker 1:Yeah, don't apologize for asking people for help. You're kind of giving them a front row opportunity to be part of it. Yeah.
Speaker 2:I love that you bring that up.
Speaker 2:We talk a lot about what we call transformational giving versus transactional giving, where it's so incredibly critical that our champions we call themational giving versus transactional giving, where it's so incredibly critical that our champions we call them champions instead of donors, because they're champions of our cause and champions of our teenage moms and our heart is that they would experience God not just our mamas and their children, but our champions would also experience God through their giving, and they may be a Christian.
Speaker 2:They may not be a Christian, but we have the opportunity to love them in Christ, to thank them and appreciate them and make sure they understand. The value of what they gave goes far beyond whether it was, you know, the widow on a fixed income who's able to give $5 a month, or the wealthy person who might be able to give $10,000. Either way, god is multiplying that and using that and, most importantly, what we want our champions to hear is that most of our moms grew up in homes where the people who were supposed to in quotation marks take care of them did not do that, and you, as their champion, are giving them that opportunity and coming alongside them and supporting them and investing in them in a way that they were sort of shortchanged from having as a child. Hope House staff and volunteers may be the actual hands and feet delivering that relationship and building that pathway for them, but you, as the champion, made it possible, absolutely.
Speaker 1:And the other thing it's kind of an aha moment for me when I was reading your story was the idea of okay, so you're emphasizing and let's you know the whole idea of you can teach a man to fish instead of giving him a fish.
Speaker 1:You're helping these young women learn self-sufficiency skills, and what I learned in reading this is you know, generational poverty is a factor in this right. So generational poverty or generational trauma in some cases generational trauma yes, very much so. So by giving these young women a place to not only live but to raise their children, not only are you breaking the cycle with her generation, the mother's generation, but you are breaking the cycle with the child's generation. So the child now is probably afforded opportunities that that child wouldn't have had, even if the mother had had a stable situation in her parents' home, even if it had been stable, had had a stable situation in her parents' home. Even if it had been stable, that child probably wouldn't have had access to preschool no-transcript as well.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah. So to your sorry I get I get sidetracked. But to your question about growth, we, over the past 20 years, essentially have grown as we've seen the needs of the mothers change and shift. Like what do, what do our teenage moms need? So we started out as a residential program. We could serve up to six moms and their children in that residential home that was built for us and within about two years or a year and a half of that home being completed and the building process being done, we began receiving calls from moms who needed their GED. So we started partnering with the church next door to utilize some of their classroom space to offer GED and that led to a college and career program, which led to hey, if we're going to have, we had moved into like this little tiny warehouse space to do all of our programming that was not residential. So we still had the residential home, but we had begun renting for a very low price from one of our champions some additional space where we could do the GED program and college and career program.
Speaker 2:We'd started offering parenting classes and we had one little room that wasn't being used and we said, well, what if we started babysitting the kids while the moms are working on their GED or studying for college. And within about a month we're like, why are we babysitting? In quotation marks, we should be providing early learning. So we started providing a curriculum, working on early education with our kiddos, and now today on our campus we have the residential home, which can still serve just six moms and their kids. But we also have completed a capital campaign in 2019 to build a resource center.
Speaker 2:So we now have a 15,000 square foot resource center where we do the vast majority of the work that we do with our moms.
Speaker 2:We'll serve 265 teenage moms and their children through that building today, and that's a variety of educational programs, mental health programming, counseling all sorts of community building activities like just building relationship between themselves, the staff and volunteers. And then we just last week had our very first class open in our brand new Early Learning Center, which provides full-time child care for our teenage moms while they go to school or work full-time. We can have up to 104 children of our teenage moms in our Early Learning Center. So our campus is now as complete as it can be on the space that it's in. We don't have any land left in the little two acres that we have. But we have our resource center, our early education center and our residential program and then we do a variety of housing partnerships off of our campus to help house the moms who, because so many of them, have crisis housing needs and we obviously can't fit them all in our little residential home. So we do a ton of partnering.
Speaker 1:So what's neat is, even though you can't have the moms living there full-time, you have been able to serve teen moms in the community and 104 daycare spots 104 daycare spots that's amazing.
Speaker 2:It is literally the best joy ever to walk into that brand new building and hear those kids like giggling and laughing and running around their little preschool rooms and also crying. There are also tears when a mom drops off. But we in Colorado and I know it's a crisis really across our nation we have a child care crisis. We have 90,000 too few spots for child care in Colorado, so 90,000 children who need child care cannot get it, and every state has a child care assistance program the Colorado Child Care Assistance Program. All of our moms are eligible for this assistance, meaning that they pay a portion of their child care and then the state pays a portion of their child care based on mom's income. Ccap spots, or Colorado Child Care Assistance Program spots, are almost zero. So our entire center is eligible for CCAP, so all of our moms can go to school or work full-time or part-time. They may be going to school part-time, working part-time. They pay what they can afford to pay and the state helps with the rest.
Speaker 2:We still have to do a good bit of fundraising for the program as well, but it allows our moms to. Essentially, we serve our moms between the ages of 15 and 25. So they come into our program as a teenager. We serve them until they turn 25. So by the time they're 22, 23, they may actually have the opportunity to go to college. And if we can provide their child care so that they can go to school, then, yes, we're doing exactly what you said and breaking that cycle of poverty for two generations. And one beautiful story that exemplifies that. Our very first mom her name was Fendia. She was the very first girl who moved into the residential program back in 2003. Her daughter now is in her second year of college at Metro State University and she is getting a degree in psychiatric nursing and she has literally broken the cycle of poverty for two generations.
Speaker 1:That gives me goosebumps. Lisa, that is so beautiful. So I mean, and this is just going to go on and on and on, and you have done this for 20 years.
Speaker 2:Yes, we are in our 21st year of existence, so we have a small group of moms who were our very first mamas, and all of those kids are now in their you know, 19, 20 year old range, and most of them are in college or married or working.
Speaker 2:I mean, we have homeowners, we have moms who've gone on to become nurses, many who've ended up in healthy marriages, and the most important thing to us is that our moms have the opportunity to know how much God loves them and that if they our moms so often have faced so much judgment and so much stigma and shame around becoming a teenage mom and they have so much trauma in their life, they often feel like if there is a God, he must either hate me or he's super mad at me, because why does my life look like this? And for us to have the opportunity to help them to understand just how much Jesus loves them and has a plan for them and for their child, that's the ultimate best thing that we can possibly do, and it's such a joy to see that so many of those early moms and still today, so many of our newer moms are coming to know that Jesus loves them.
Speaker 1:Oh man, isn't that the truth? That is so beautiful. And I promised this woman who's running this whole thing I said I am not going to go over time with you and I might go over a few minutes. So here's why Because I'm going to ask you. Someone who's listening to this is like you know what. Maybe I don't have the energy to start a home in my community for teen moms, but you know what. I want to support what she's doing, and you're obviously a nonprofit organization. Where can people find you? And if they want to donate to Hope House, where can they find out how to do that?
Speaker 2:Oh, thank you for asking that. You can find us on our website, hopehousecoloradoorg, and there's a big donate button right there. There's also a link to purchase my book. A Place to Belong. There are details about the programming we offer and, if you happen to be close enough to a Hope House location in Southern or Northern Colorado or here in the Denver area, there's also information about how you can volunteer.
Speaker 1:Oh, great idea. Well, I am incredibly impressed by your work and I don't think it's an accident that I found you. I told Lisa beforehand Lisa's actually a friend of a friend of mine and my friend said Stephanie, you've got to have my friend, lisa Stephen, on your podcast. She's done this amazing thing. And I said, well, sure, you're like I'm thinking, can I get her? Well, so my girlfriend bought Lisa's book and she mailed it to me and I read it immediately. I mean it is. I've already told you it is so inspiring and so encouraging Like you can make a difference, even if you're not a multi-bazillionaire.
Speaker 1:Step by step you can. And then, out of the blue, I am still reading her book and I'm thinking, by the time I finish her book, maybe I'll get up the nerve. I'll email her, see if she'll come on. I got an email from Lisa's publicist who said well, you have this woman on your podcast. I'm like well, I'm going to save you money. I already have her book, you don't have to send it to me. I'm almost done with it. So I don't think it's an accident that you're here. So if you're listening to this, it might be because God's thinking hey, some of these listeners are going to want to help this ministry and you just never know what is going to be on the other side of that.
Speaker 2:So thank you. Well, I love, love, love that God connected us, and I thank you so much for giving me an opportunity to share just a little bit of our story.
Speaker 1:Well, thank you so much for your time and I look forward to hearing from some of our listeners. Good luck with everything you're doing, thank you.
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