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Christina’s House Executive Director Shannon Mumblo, squatting, right, andPresident Linda Mumblo, center, child on lap, pose with families and volunteers to celebrate one family’s graduation from the Madison Avenue home. Prime submitted photo |
By Debbie Gardner
The call came out of the blue last August, just as Christina’s House Executive Director Shannon Mumblo and her mother-in-law, Founder Linda Mumblo were preparing to leave for the family’s annual summer trip.
The director of a fellow Christian community had a house going up for sale, and they very much wanted it to go to another faith-based nonprofit
"We were actually leaving for vacation the next day,” Shannon told Prime about the unexpected offer.
“When he called I knew that it was the next growth of our mission.”
Founded by career nurse and devout Christian Linda Mumblo in 2014, for the past six years the original Christina’s House, located on Madison Avenue in Springfield, MA., has provided homeless and near-homeless mothers and their children with a place to live and learn important life skills through a faith-based, Christ-centered, volunteer-supported and privately funded 18 to 24-month transitional housing program.
Birth of the mission
During a Facebook Live fundraiser for the second phase of the nonprofit’s mission on May 5th’s Giving Tuesday, Linda reprised the story of how Christina’s House came to be, recalling that she felt the Lord had “planted” the idea for the house “in my heart” in 2010, when she first saw a group of men – whom she later discovered were from the Springfield Rescue Mission – attending weekly services at her church. She said she learned church attendance was a part of the Rescue Mission’s program, but busy with her nursing position at Baystate Medical Center, she said she didn’t think too much about them, or the homeless population in the area, at the time. But, Linda said, it seemed the Lord wasn’t through with her curiosity.
“I kept hearing in my head, ‘What about the women? What about the children?’ And it just wouldn’t go away,” she said. Research showed her there was “very little out there” to help homeless women, especially “women with children,” she told her Facebook Live audience. “So I really believed the Lord wanted me to open a home for homeless women and their kids.”
Linda founded the original Christina’s House two years later, in 2012, and the Madison Avenue home opened to accept its first families at the end of 2014.
As for the name for the new nonprofit, Christina’s House, it was chosen when Shannon was looking for baby names for her first child, a daughter. Searching through the baby name book she and Linda discovered the name “Christina” means “followers of Christ” - a perfect choice - Shannon told Prime during a November 2018 interview about the nonprofit.
Seeds of growth
Shannon told Prime that even before she received the call from the fellow Christian mission, throughout 2019 she had felt “God had been working to grow the mission, but I didn’t know how.”
When the call came she said “I knew this was the next growth of our mission.” Shannon shared, “I started crying on the phone with the owner, who I knew, but not well, because I knew this was God’s next phase in our [work].”
She and Linda set up a meeting to tour the property, located on Union Street in Springfield, MA., as soon as the family returned from vacation. She said she and Linda immediately “fell in love” with the property.
“It has 11 bedrooms, the house was in good shape, another beautiful historic home [like Madison Avenue] and it was a big enough space for families to live together,” she said. The nonprofit’s board of directors was “immediately on board, they saw no negatives,” Shannon said, and work began on drawing up a budget for acquiring what would soon become the second Christina’s House.
The financing was drawn up, with a portion of the nonprofit’s remade mortgage payment going to the previous owners of the new Union Street home, and fundraising began for a Capital Campaign to get the new house ready for its next mission. That fundraising was well underway when, earlier this spring the coronavirus pandemic swept in.
Adapting to continue
“We’ve had to cancel all our fundraisers,” Shannon told her Facebook Live audience on May 5 as she laid out the day’s online activities – including testimonials from several mothers who have participated in the program – for those who might be watching throughout the event. The goal for the day was to raise $8,000, the remaining amount needed to reach the $50,000 Capital Campaign figure to begin work preparing Union Street. She said by 7 p.m. that day, they had reached their $8,000 goal.
The presentations in the Giving Tuesday online fundraiser – including Linda Mumblo’s explanation of how she came to found Christina’s House and the testimonials by several of the program’s participants – are still available to view at www.facebook.com/Christinashouse.org/
Shannon said despite the COVID-19 restrictions put in place on construction work by Gov. Charlie Baker in March, because the Union Street home is unoccupied, lead abatement work was able to begin on May 8. Plans are to have that work, and the other renovations necessary to bring everything in the house up to code, by the end of the summer. She hopes to be able to welcome the first families into the new Christina’s House by mid–August.
Fundraising – in whatever form is acceptable as the country moves toward a new normal – will also continue for “sheets and blankets and programming materials” and everything else necessary to keep both locations of Christina’s House up and running, Shannon shared. “We’ll have a calendar raffle in July,” she said, adding they are looking into organizing other types of online fundraiser for the time being. For information on participating in the calendar raffle, which will be sold through the month of June, Shannon said to email deb@christinashouse.org.
Looking forward to 2021, Shannon explained she is actively doing “a lot of grant writing” to help make the two houses sustainable.
“We still have a mortgage,” she said. “It would be awesome if we got an inheritance that would pay off both houses.”
Seeing the fruits
The restrictions imposed under COVID-19 have created some challenges for the volunteer–run programming at the original house, but it has also had a silver lining, according to Shannon. As social distancing recommendations meant volunteers had to severely limit any direct work with families, she said she got to see “all the skills” those volunteers had been teaching the Home’s current group of mothers and children put to work.
“It’s a blessing,” she shared. “Here is everything we have taught [them] coming together in solidarity to keep the house running.”
Tutoring for the now homeschooled children has continued online, as have the finance, counseling and life skills classes for the mothers, and the religious services for the families. One resident, who was completing a nursing degree this spring, also did so by finishing her classes online as well, Shannon said. With some minor modifications, she said they were able to carve out study spaces for everyone, create an exercise room with a donated stationary bike and some online streaming fitness classes, and thanks to another donation, erect a volleyball net for some outdoor activity at the home.
“The hardest thing for all of use is missing the volunteers and the face–to–face interaction,” she admitted. In the fall Shannon said both Christina’s House locations hope to be able to welcome back volunteers, and she is actively looking for individuals interested in helping the mission.
She also said in this time of online shopping for so many of life’s necessities, an easy way to support Christina’s House is to shop through AmazonSmile and designate Christina’s House as your preferred charity.
For more information about how you can get involved with Christina’s house, including upcoming fundraisers and volunteer opportunities, visit https://christinashouse.org
