ALLENTOWN, Pa. – Learning to live again after coming out of prison is a community effort for some women in Allentown thanks to SELF! House.<\/p>\n
The home, and the women who run it, are being honored by the Pennsylvania Rivers Chapter of the American Red Cross this week as Lehigh Valley Heroes.<\/p>\n
There is room to breathe here.<\/p>\n
Space to reclaim what you’ve lost and sometimes start something new.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe are at SELF! house,\u201d says Co-Founder Enid Santiago.<\/p>\n
It’s a home in Allentown for women who are just coming out of prison or who have been through other trauma that need to re-enter society- founded on the idea that everyone deserves another chance.<\/p>\n
A principle that Founder Luna Fernandez lives by.<\/p>\n
\u201cShe spent 10 years incarcerated and SELF! was born out of her life struggles. So, this was her vision, the SELF! House,\u201d Enid explains.<\/p>\n
Enid says there’s an active waiting list- there are rooms for 5 women.<\/p>\n
Ideally, they stay for a year, get their paperwork in order, find a job, create a life, all while having the support to succeed.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt means independence, it means life literally is oxygen for them to be able to walk in here and say \u2018Wow\u2019,\u201d says Enid.<\/p>\n
They say re-entry starts the day you walk into the prison, not the day you walk out. So, deciding where you go after matters.<\/p>\n
This home is for the women who do not have a place to go. This home can be an option, and for many means freedom.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou always want to set them up for success. And this is one of the places that I adore the most\u2026 it’s a big complete life change for anybody, you know, especially when you don’t think you have anybody\u2026and this is one house that will give you everything and anything,\u201d volunteer Liz Villanueva explains.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis is a lot of pride seeing someone the way that they walk in here, broken, their head is down and seeing them walk out with their shoulder. yourself laughing, making jokes, and a whole different human is you can’t pay for that feeling. It’s indescribable,\u201d says Enid.<\/p>\n
Each letter in the name means something- SELF! stands for Strongly Embracing Life’s Future, and here it starts with a room to call your own.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"ALLENTOWN, Pa. – Learning to live again after coming out of prison is a community effort for some…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":133882,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[119,121,120,22077,61853,10095],"class_list":["post-133881","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-allentown","tag-allentown","tag-allentown-headlines","tag-allentown-news","tag-incarceration","tag-re-entry","tag-women"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/133881","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=133881"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/133881\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/133882"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=133881"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=133881"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=133881"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}