A Path Home

The struggles KATRINA KNIGHT’s parents faced as children and young adults inspired their daughter to find ways to help others.

“My dad had experienced going without and being hungry and having to start working at age twelve to support his mother because she was a single mom in the 1930s and ’40s,” Knight says.

Meanwhile, her mother faced serious health problems as a baby, to the point where relatives thought they would have to let her go for good.

“The family would tell a story about how her uncle went home one night and said, ‘You know, I’ve held that baby for the last time. She’s not going to make it until tomorrow.’”

Lucky for Knight, her mother survived, and Knight’s parents passed on the lessons from their different challenges to their daughter.

Knight, who has been the executive director of Wilmington-based nonprofit organization Good Shepherd Center for twenty-two years, was also lucky enough not to face the same kind of adversities nor ever go without the essentials herself, she says.

But when Knight worked for a St. Louis-based housing resources group after earning her master’s degree in 1999 from Washington University, she hadn’t anticipated leading an organization that operated homeless shelters as a career. The reason for that, she says, was because she had been on the front lines and seen many such shelters turn people away.

“I saw them being too restrictive … sometimes discriminatory,” Knight says. “I didn’t really have examples of homeless shelters where I would have aspired to go into that line of work necessarily, and so I thought there was about a 0% chance that I was a fit for Good Shepherd, and vice versa.”

But it became clear during her interview that she and the organization might align after all.

“I was asking a lot of tough questions of them (the board of directors),” she says, including inquiring why they were building a night shelter at that time.

Knight went on to ask board members, “Is it just because there’s an unmet need (for overnight safety) or is there more to it? … And to their credit, very quickly their response was, ‘We don’t even know what you mean. If you’re saying there’s more that we could do by these people, we want to hear more. … We would be open to learning more, and if you’re the one who comes here, we will support you in making that happen,’” Knight says.

Those who believe in the mission of the center have been making things happen for more than forty years. In 1983, concerned residents created a soup kitchen in downtown Wilmington to feed the homeless. With a lot of help, including funding from other organizations and churches, the initiative evolved into today’s center, one of the largest providers of homeless services in the Wilmington area. In addition to feeding people in need, the center’s current programs, according to its website, include the Sgt. Eugene Ashley Center, providing transitional and permanent supportive housing for veterans and men with disabilities; a day shelter with access to showers, clothing, transportation and on-site health services; and a night shelter with about 120 beds for homeless men, women and families with children.

Good Shepherd opened the first phase of SECU Lakeside Reserve, which holds forty apartments, in 2017, followed by the second in 2019. Center officials created the project “expressly to house chronically homeless people with the most significant disabilities, folks who have lived in the woods, folks who have slept in their car in the park for years,” Knight says, adding that these would be people who would remain homeless and be unable to regain and hold onto stable housing “without a really intentional housing-plus-services intervention.”

SECU The Sparrow, a more recent housing development led by Good Shepherd Center, started welcoming residents in June this year.

The apartment complex on Carolina Beach Road has thirty-two units of supportive housing for chronically homeless people with significant disabilities.

Support for the project came through a competitive funding opportunity from the N.C. Housing Finance Agency through the Supportive Housing American Rescue Plan (SHARP) program, according to a Greater Wilmington Business Journal story.

Additional major investment came from the city of Wilmington, which donated a former fire station site to the project and contributed capital and pre-development support. The State Employees’ Credit Union Foundation provided a $2 million challenge grant to help the project move forward.

“Many people know Good Shepherd Center for our shelter and meal programs,” Knight said in May, “but supportive housing is one of the most effective tools we have to end homelessness for neighbors with the greatest barriers to stability.”

Subsequent Good Shepherd Center boards have continued the support promised when members interviewed Knight more than two decades ago, she says.

“Over and over again, I have seen different iterations of this board say, ‘If not us, then who?’ And if there’s a chance that this will be meaningful in the lives of the people we are striving to serve,” Knight says, “then it is worth trying to do the hard thing.”