Therese Garrett

If you have ever visited Sister Carmen Community Center (SCCC), chances are you’ve crossed paths with Lupita. She has been one of our most active and enthusiastic participants ever since she first walked through our doors over a decade ago. Although in recent years, she’s usually the one giving help rather than receiving it.

At the end of a very successful career in property management, Sue decided to give back by spending her final years of employment working for an affordable housing rental company. When money was tight for tenants, she often referred them to Sister Carmen Community Center (SCCC) for the food bank, thrift store, or financial assistance. She never imagined that one day she might need any of these resources herself. That was, until she retired.

Jackie’s story began in the St. Thomas U.S. Virgin Islands with the dream of a better life for her son. While St. Thomas may be paradise for vacationers, it’s a hard place for locals to eke out a living due to limited job prospects, a poor school system, expensive housing, and a general lack of the basic goods and services that we take for granted in the states.

You may remember the Jounou family: mother Hanifa (age 65), her sister, Aisha (57), Hanifa’s two daughters, Radi (35) and Bana (28), and her two sons, Hamid (33) and Yussef (27). (Hanifa’s husband died in 2009.) In 2013, the family fled war-torn Syria and spent six years in a refugee camp in Lebanon, where they devoted their time to helping settle other refugee families, before moving to the United States in 2019.