Ginger Hill witnessed a lot of abuse and violence as a child, but she hadn’t experienced domestic abuse first-hand. That is until 2009. That’s when she met her now ex-boyfriend. “He happened to be really very violent,” she said. “And in 2010, he severely beat me. It was pretty bad; it put me in the hospital. I had dislocated bones and just a lot of stuff.”

That’s when things started to really take a turn for the worse. Ginger started losing connections with her family members as a result of what was going on with this relationship. She was also having trouble focusing and dealing with memories and visions she was having reliving the experiences, especially since she felt alone and isolated from her family. She was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder.

Then, things really spiraled out of control in 2012, when the police were called to her residence. They found drugs. Ginger’s kids were taken away from her in September of that year. Then, in October, her sister passed away. It was too much, and she felt too alone.

“I could only see my kids one hour a week and if they were going to be at Thanksgiving or Christmas with my family, I could not be there,” she said. “So, not only did I lose my kids. I lost my sister, and then I really lost my whole family. It was very traumatic at the time.”

In 2015, she ended up in prison. But her freedom after completing her sentence was short-lived. “I’d only been out of prison for like seven-and-a-half months, and I got in trouble for Association, and I went back to prison,” she said. “But while I was in the county jail waiting to go back to prison, I just prayed. I just prayed to God, and I was like, ‘Listen, I do not have control of my life. I’ve realized this now.’ I just told Him, you know what? I’m just going to let you lead me wherever you’re going to lead me.”

He led her to Journey to New Life. Now, she’s a critical part of the organization, providing ongoing peer support as a House Manager at Peace House. After completing the program at Journey House, and living independently for a time, Georgia Walker, Executive Director at Journey to New Life, tapped Ginger to help get Peace House up and running. She’s been there ever since.

When you come out of prison, and you’re not being judged — that, I think is one of the biggest things, because when you go back home, everybody’s just waiting for you to mess up. So you come here, and they just view you with love and kindness. They don’t care what your story was. They just want you to succeed. And there’s just this welcoming, non-judgmental — just love, really — and it’s great.

 

— Ginger

Ginger has made so much progress since getting out of prison. Not only is she an important part of the Journey to New Life team, she’s reconciled with her family — and she’s a brand new home owner. On December 10, 2021, she closed on her own home in St. Louis, Missouri, where she’s from. Her daughter will live there full-time, and Ginger will continue to combine her days off from Peace House each month to visit her family there.

Now, she has a place of her own to stay when she visits.

This, she says was an important move for her because she wants to go back home to St. Louis to see her family, but she didn’t ever want to overstay her welcome. “I live here [at Peace House], and then I go back home, and I’m always staying with somebody. I never feel like I have my own place just to unwind, relax and just breathe,” she said. “I always feel like maybe I’m overstaying. Maybe I shouldn’t stay eight days. I always feel like I’m overstaying my welcome, or I’m invading their space.”

So getting her own space was an important step, and she gives much of the credit for this accomplishment to the experiences she’s had, including her experience at Journey to New Life. While she’s been at Peace House as a House Manager, she’s been able to learn how to build her credit, something she says she never learned growing up.

“I really don’t think I would have ever got to this point had I not been through everything that I’ve been through,” she said. “You know, I’ve learned to be grateful for just every little thing.”