[NEWS] A Healing Embrace

From The Philadelphia Citizen: 

The first thing you notice is the quiet.

Entering the doors of Joyce’s Place, Project HOME’s new safe haven for women experiencing homelessness, feels a bit like entering a student center at a liberal arts college. The building, overlooking the bucolic Bala Golf Club, is a restored red-brick mansion from 1927, with charming archways and heavy wooden doors. Above the entrance, a Shakespeare inscription reads “see the players well bestowed” — fitting, given that the building was originally a retirement home for actors, their names still preserved on bedroom doors.

Sunlight pours through large, double-paned windows in the community room, filled with couches and an exercise bike, a large flat-screen TV and a piano. Trees blow in the breeze outside the cafeteria which, with its funky overhead light fixtures and flower vases, looks more like a coffee shop than an institutional lunchroom. Birds flit about and a groundhog chases its tail in the expansive yard, where staff and residents hope to plant a garden.

On the western edge of the city and Fairmount Park, Joyce’s Place feels worlds away from the urban bustle of Philadelphia, where on any given night approximately 900 single, adult women experience homelessness.