| Program restores hope for family in need |
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Ten years earlier, while house hunting in North Minneapolis, Jen Fairbourne and her husband knew when they walked up the steps to the little two-story bungalow that they were home. Matilda, their 20 month old daughter knew it, too, marching into the front door and shouting, “My house!” Jen was tired of temporary spaces. She had grown up on the streets—a homeless teenager—sought help and counseling at Project Offstreets—turned her life around—founded her own Minneapolis non-profit, Frameworks, offering arts education and transitional housing to homeless youth. Now, with her young family, Jen was going to own a piece of permanence. Jen’s husband Marcus died in a motorcycle accident two weeks before they were to close on their house. When the insurance money came in, it helped Jen make her original house payments. “I had no idea how much I would have to sacrifice to get this house,” she says. She sips her tea, slips back, briefly, into the past. “Moving into this house kept me focused, gave me a reason to go on. It was a miracle…of a sort.” Sounds from outside bring Jen back to the present: the scraping of ladders being repositioned, tunes from a portable radio, nails being driven into roofing. A Brush with Kindness volunteers have repaired the garage and moved on to fixing up the house’s exterior—making it warm and safe and code-friendly before winter comes. They’re almost done installing the new gutters on the back of the house. “This house just needs some love back,” Jen says. Jen and Matilda have decorated their home with paintings and drawings and sculpture; with gargoyles and angels and feathers and fireflies and fairies; a place where the goddess rules. “I refuse to give up this house,” Jen states simply. “This is where I come to refill the well.” A place of peace and solitude. A place to make art, to play the violin, to pet the dogs, to do homework, to move on to the future. A place where, even after another stressful day of trying to provide spiritual and emotional sustenance to the troubled, homeless kids she understands so well, there is hope.
“If you have hope,” Jen Fairbourne says, “you can do just about anything.”
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The citation from the City came as a shock. A stranger had run his car into the side of Jen Fairbourne’s garage, leaving a partially crumbling stucco wall. Now, she had only a few weeks to repair the thing or face escalating fines—the last thing to add to an already tight budget. Frustrated, Jen turned to Twin Cities Habitat’s A Brush with Kindness neighborhood revitalization program.
