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Eden's Place: Foster home for girls set to open in South Dallas
Volunteers are helping turn the South Dallas home into a beautiful place for young women who've endured some ugly moments in life.
DALLAS - The vision of a residential home for girls who've experienced trauma is just about complete. It will be a first in South Dallas.
A house is being transformed so that lives can be transformed.
It’s the vision of Renee White, and it’s called Eden’s Place.
"And it’s a beautiful thing to actually watch what you have on your head come to life. It’s beautiful," she said.
Volunteers are helping turn the South Dallas home into a beautiful place for young women who've endured some ugly moments in life.
"We're servicing girls 13 to 17 years of age who have gone through very traumatic situations from physical abuse to emotional abuse and sex trafficking," White said. "I knew that there was some young lady like myself who'd gone through something who needed some help."
White started her journey using what she had to build her vision.
It’s a vision that Waxahachie Lowe's Store Manager Sam Gonzalez saw and came alongside.
"We're glad to help any way we can be part of the community," he said. "Any way we can, it's always great."
White was featured in Shaun Rabb’s Here & Now segment, and viewers responded.
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Here & Now: Eden’s Place
As many as 400 children in the foster system have no safe place to stay. One North Texas woman who experienced her own childhood trauma is hoping to make a difference by opening a foster home for girls in Southern Dallas. FOX 4’s Shaun Rabb learns more about Eden's Place in this week's Here & Now.
"We had an outrageous response from the community from everywhere," she said. "Volunteers came out to paint this beautiful 7,400 square-foot facility. We had about eight volunteers from fraternities and sororities to just plain old citizens who watched our news story and said, ‘I want to get involved.’"
"This is a great project. We actually heard of it through the news, actually," said Sam Kang with the Charles Schwab Community Ambassador Program. "And when she made a call out for help and assistance, our Schwab volunteers were ready to help up, stand up and really assist with everything."
More support is in place for when the doors open.
"We're undergirding them with resources to help them once they get open to support the girls as well as the organization as a whole," said Pearl Rivers with The Potter’s House.
But furniture, beds, dishes and computers are still needed to make Eden's Place a house of hope and more.
"It is more than a house of hope," White said. "It’s a house of love and of serenity and peace, a place for these young ladies to know that they are safe and can rebuild their lives again."
The build-out is almost complete now. It needs to be finished out.
White is hoping the community will answer the call and hoping to open in the next couple of months.