A Room of Her Own

Before coming to the Homeless Prenatal Program (HPP), Ebony Caraway had been moving around a lot. After the COVID-19 pandemic interrupted her coursework at California State University, Monterey Bay in 2020, she had been forced to move back home to San Francisco. After she discovered she was pregnant, the father of her future daughter was incarcerated, and she had been forced to couch-surf. While she was nervous about moving into HPP’s Jelani House – the agency’s transitional housing shelter for pregnant and postpartum women and their babies – she believed that, at the end of the day, she had to do what was best for herself and her baby. “[Couch-surfing] is not what I wanted for myself, and it’s not what I wanted for my daughter,” she says.

Transitions can be difficult, but Ebony’s move to Jelani House was made easier by the shelter’s dual emphasis on community and privacy for its residents. “It’s a community, a community kitchen, a community living room. You get to interact with the girls, but you have your own bedroom… It’s not like other shelters where it’s bunk beds and you have no privacy,” she says. With the shared living spaces of Jelani House, Ebony was able to connect with other pregnant women, and in doing so, she knew she was not going through her pregnancy alone. With her own room, she had the space she needed to get ready for work and unwind after work.

A room of her own was especially important, as she spent the majority of the time she lived at Jelani House working in security. She would “go to work, come back and go to sleep, then do it all over again – each and every day.” Jelani House residents pay rent based on what they receive from CalWorks, but at the end of their stay, that money is returned to them. Moreover, the shelter provides food for residents. “There’s a pantry and whiteboard where you add specific foods that you want and they make sure to get it,” Ebony says. Working as much as she did, over the course of the year that she lived at Jelani House, she was able to save a lot of money – enough to move out of the shelter into her own apartment.

Today, living in Antioch with her daughter Andrea, Ebony appreciates her time at Jelani House as she looks forward to the future. “When I was at Jelani House – even though it’s like you’re doing your own thing – those times, when I would connect with people, it just makes you feel that…at the end of the day, y’all both moms, y’all going through the same things being pregnant and things of that sort,” she says. Ebony’s experience with other pregnant moms and her own experience of birth, with a doula who made her “feel comfortable and empowered”, changed her life. Currently training to be a birth doula, Ebony wants to be what her doula was for her for other women, but that isn’t all she wants to do. She says, “As you grow, you learn about parts of yourself you didn’t know…Becoming a doula is just the first step to realize what other tools I want to use.”