“House” and “home” are synonyms, but most ofus can easily define the difference. A house providesfour walls and a roof — a structure to keep us protectedfrom the elements. A home provides comfort— a place to rejuvenate and be ourselves.
Pontiac-based nonprofit Humble Design focuseson bridging the divide between those two words.The organization completely furnishes living spacefor homeless families that have moved into permanentsupportive housing in the belief that a truesense of home can provide hope and confidence,empowering families to stay on their feet.
“Our first and foremost mission is to get everychild off the floor and into a bed,” says Julie Nagle,Humble Design’s director. “A bed stands for safety.It gives the children his or her own place to dream,to think about their future. Knowing you havea bed for your children to sleep in, for a mom toknow her child isn’t sleeping on the floor — it givesyou confidence.”
Treger Strasberg co-founded Humble Design in2009 while volunteering at Forgotten Harvest, anOak Park organization that fights hunger. When aregular Forgotten Harvest volunteer found herselffacing homelessness, Strasberg got her an apartmentand asked friends to donate secondhand furniture.Soon the woman’s house was fully furnished, but donationskept arriving. The local shelter couldn’t takethem, so Strasberg and a friend, Humble Designco-founder Ana Smith, found a storage facility inTroy. The duo started collaborating with shelters toprovide the household items to clients moving intopermanent housing.
Strasberg and Smith had stumbled upon anunmet need. Government funding for homelessindividuals tends to extend only as far as transitionalhousing itself, plus help with utilities. Aid recipientsare largely on their own when it comes to obtainingfurnishings and other household items, and familiesoften find themselves sleeping on the floor. This isespecially true for women who have fled domesticviolence, since they often take little to nothing withthem; Humble Design estimates that as many as90 percent of their clients are female victims ofdomestic abuse and their children.
In 2014, Humble Design moved to a 12,000-square-foot facility in Pontiac. Today, the organizationhas 11 employees, including four designers, andserves three families each week. All families comevia referral from one of Humble Design’s partner organizationsin Wayne and Oakland counties, whichinclude HAVEN, the Coalition on Temporary Shelter(COTS), and Grace Centers of Hope. A familymust have no other resources to obtain furnishingsin order to be referred.
The entire furnishing process takes less than aweek for Humble Design. Designers meet with familiesto learn their individual needs and preferences,then return to the warehouse to tag items and accessories,and, finally, decorate the family’s new home.
Designers bend over backward to accommodate achild’s wishes, Nagle says, even though they have towork with whatever happens to be in the warehouseat the time. When a young boy asked for a Batman-themedroom, a designer found a lamp with a blackbase and a white shade and drew Gotham City on itusing a black Sharpie marker.
“We really make a big deal out of the kids’ room;the mom’s we make like a sanctuary,” Nagle says.
Charles Pearson, program director at COTS,remembers the first family he referred to HumbleDesign from his Detroit-based organization. Afamily of eight was going to be moving beforeChristmas and had “absolutely nothing.”
“Humble Design furnished their whole entirehouse,” Pearson says. “Bedrooms for the children,Christmas gifts — they filled the refrigerator up, putup Christmas decorations.
“When you put a person in a house and you putfurniture in it, it becomes a home,” he adds. “Itmakes a person want to stay there, want to haveneighbors, they don’t want to move. They want tosit at the table and have breakfast and dinner together— have a place for children to sit and dohomework. All of that is very important to a person’srehabilitation and self-sufficiency. It’s really key.”
Humble Design’s numbers support Pearson’ssentiments: In 2014, 90 of the 91 families the organizationserved remained in stable housing.
For Angela Boyce, a 31-year-old mother of five,Humble Design helped re-establish a feeling of normalcyafter she fled an abusive husband and had tolive out of a van with her kids in California as shefought for custody. After finally being granted fulllegal and physical custody of her children, Boycefound a job in Michigan, where she’d grown up, andreturned to the state in 2012. She and her childrenlived in a shelter as she struggled to get ahead, thenmoved into supportive housing in May 2014. HumbleDesign furnished the house.
“You name it — anything you think you need tostart off, they gave me,” Boyce says. “I feel like I havea home again … It gives you so much encouragementto go on living the way you want to be. I’m going togo on living my life as though the impossible is possiblefor me.”
Want to help? Humble Design alwaysneed beds, bed frames, cribs, bedding andbath towels in good condition. For moreinformation, go to .
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