Chapter 18: Portraits and Possibilities: Empowerment Through Literacy

Hope House is a recovery home for women; a safe space that provides the residents with their physical needs, allowing them to work on recovery through outside programs, meetings, counseling and job training. The women arrive after coming out of mental institutions, as recovering addicts or after incarceration, and their stay is temporary: they are free to leave at will, though most stay for several months or longer, as they work on getting their lives back on track. Most of the women living in Hope House belong to groups on the bottom rungs of the social and economic ladders: women of poverty, released prisoners, substance abusers whose lives and families have fallen apart, women whose children have been taken away by court orders, women suffering from mental illness, abused women, women of color. These women’s voices have long been silenced by personal and social criticism and labeling, and they are generally powerless in defining their own identity and/or as agents in their own lives.