By Jessica Koss, Director of Community Engagement, BRHF
For women and children experiencing homelessness, finding a safe place to turn isn’t always as simple as making a phone call.
In Mercer County, families facing housing instability often encounter limited options that meet their unique needs. Some spend nights in hotels, cars, on a friend’s couch—or in unorthodox places no one should have to call home. Without stable housing, it becomes far more difficult to maintain employment, keep children in school, access healthcare, or begin addressing the challenges that led to the crisis in the first place.
That reality is about to change.
The Buhl Regional Health Foundation (BRHF) has awarded a multi-year, $1.5 million grant as part of a capital campaign to Joshua’s Haven City Rescue Mission so they can construct a dedicated housing shelter for women and children at its Sharon, Pennsylvania campus. The project will create something Mercer County has never had before: a dedicated place where women and children experiencing a housing emergency can find not only shelter, but the structure, support, and stability needed to begin rebuilding their lives.
“Every child deserves the opportunity to grow up in a safe, stable environment, and every parent deserves the chance to rebuild their home life after experiencing hardship,” said Jennifer Barborak, Executive Director of BRHF. “Stable housing is more than a roof overhead—it creates the foundation from which families can access education, employment, healthcare, and the support systems they need to thrive. By investing in this project, we’re creating a path to dignity, opportunity, and a stronger future for women, children, and our entire community.”
For more than 18 years, Joshua’s Haven has served Mercer County by providing emergency shelter for men, meals, medical care, workforce development, and social services case management. Women and children have never been turned away, but helping them often meant providing temporary hotel vouchers—an option that Pastor Sherry Swetz, President and Executive Director of Joshua’s Haven, said was “just a band-aid.”
“There were things going on in the hotels that we had no control of,” Swetz explained. “Nor were we able to monitor it. Nor were we able to ask the hotel staff to monitor it because that’s not their job.”
A hotel room might provide a roof and place to sleep safely for the night, but it cannot provide the interpersonal relationships, accountability, guidance, and coordinated support that help families move beyond crisis.
That reality became painfully clear just days before Christmas when Swetz received six calls from women seeking help within a single 24-hour period.
One woman had spent the night in a laundromat.
She wasn’t there to wash clothes. She was trying to survive.
Unable to sleep because people came and went throughout the night, she stayed awake for her own safety until a cleaning employee told her about Joshua’s Haven the next morning.
Swetz and her husband drove out to find her.
They placed her in a hotel, bought her a warm coat and boots, and invited her to spend Christmas Eve at Joshua’s Haven making homemade noodles alongside staff and volunteers. What began as a meal turned into conversations, connections with community partners, employment opportunities, and eventually stable housing where she was reunited with her son.
“Her journey didn’t resolve right away,” Swetz said. “But eventually there were jobs, she got an apartment, and her son was able to move in with her. Their stability was starting to come.”
For Swetz, that’s exactly why the new transitional housing shelter matters.
“This is what’s needed,” she said. “When they’re in the midst of this, there’s no stability and they don’t know where the next provisions are coming from. So the goal of this shelter is to bring them [women and children] here under our roof. No more hotels.”
The new housing facility will allow Joshua’s Haven to provide women and children with a safe, structured environment where they can access nutritious food, social services resources, medical care, life skills programming, educational support, and individualized plans designed to help them move toward long-term independence.
For Swetz, however, the vision extends well beyond the walls of the building.
“I hope in my heart that once we have this new building, we can call a big meeting of all the agencies and ask, ‘What can we do together?'” she said. “The new housing shelter isn’t the end of the story. Working together is part of it. I’ve always said, ‘What we can do together is greater than what we can do alone.'”
She hopes every woman and child who enters the shelter experiences something many have gone without for far too long.
“I hope they come to a caring environment. A safe environment,” Swetz said. “Joshua’s Haven City Rescue Mission is not a forever place. It’s a place where, with the help of God, they can turn their life around together, as a family, and walk in a new direction.”
That philosophy has long guided Joshua’s Haven’s work with the men it serves today. The goal has never been simply to provide food and a bed for the night, but to help individuals restore stability, rebuild relationships, learn responsibility and accountability, and ultimately regain independence to flourish. The new housing shelter will bring that same holistic approach to women and children.
Swetz also believes homelessness and housing insecurity is often hidden in Mercer County.
“In bigger cities, you see people living on the streets,” she said. “Here, they’re sleeping on someone’s porch, staying in abandoned houses, living in hotel rooms for months, or spending the night in a laundromat. You don’t always see it, but it’s there.”
She emphasizes that neither hotels or the new shelter are meant to be permanent solutions.
“This isn’t forever,” she said. “It’s a temporary place of safety with the intention of helping people get back on their feet and move forward.”
Construction of the new housing shelter is the beginning of their next chapter—but Joshua’s Haven City Rescue Mission says the community will continue to play a critical role in making the vision a reality.
The organization is seeking volunteers and financial support to help sustain programming and services once the shelter for women and children opens.
Community members can support the effort by attending or volunteering to help with Joshua’s Haven’s Spaghetti Dinner Fundraiser on Saturday, September 12, from 3:00 to6:00 p.m. at Kennedy Catholic Middle-High School. Tickets are $15, with proceeds supporting future programming and operations for the new shelter. For more information about the fundraiser visit joshuashaven.org/contact/ and to sign up to volunteer, see this link joshuashaven.org/volunteer/.
Because in the end, this project isn’t simply about constructing a new building for those in desperate need.
It’s about ensuring that when a woman or child experiences one of the hardest moments of their lives, the Mercer County community is there to provide a safe place where hope, healing, and a path forward can begin.