Altruistic efforts that began in a garage 40 years ago have now expanded to become a godsend for impoverished families living in the Inland Valley Region of San Bernardino and Riverside Counties.
A recent grant from Inland Empire Community Foundation through the Community Impact Fund will further expand the efforts of The Blessing Center, a vital cross-county resource, particularly for women and children.
“The grant will be incredibly helpful for us, because our focus is on service-intensive transitional housing for homeless children,” said Dr. Craig Turley, Founder/Senior Director of The Blessing Center. “We put the children and mothers first.”
To that end, the nonprofit will use grant funding to fuel Hannah’s House of Hope, an arm of the organization that has long been providing safe and secure housing accommodations to maternity mothers in crisis, homeless unaccompanied women, and homeless mothers with children, with a strong focus on domestic violence victims.
Turley credits the program for becoming a valuable lifeline for those in need, noting that recent resources will strengthen programs offered within Hannah’s House of Hope.
“We have a series of classes, which are valuable for mothers,” he said. “These are modules that have to do with parenting skills, financial management, self-reliance, self-empowerment, and self-improvement. The moms that we serve typically have come out of backgrounds where either they didn’t have good parents or they had no parents at all.”
The one come denominator, he added, is that most of the mothers the nonprofit serves “didn’t have good moms.”
“Most of them didn’t have a healthy father figure and maybe their moms were single mothers, and it became kind of self-perpetuating,” Turley said. “We go through lengthy processes to provide the kind of services and training for these mothers, so they are better able to succeed within a one- to two-year period.”
When Hannah’s House of Hope launched more than 15 years ago, it was a one-year program. With the increase in needs, it morphed into a two-year enterprise.
“One of the reasons we extended it to two years was because there’s just no affordable housing for the moms,” Turley said, citing landlords jacking up rental costs. “Now, on that two-year program, we’re able to implement many different services that benefit the mothers, one of which, thanks to the grant, allows us to provide leadership skills that most of these single moms might be lacking, which is basic self-confidence.”
One of the most vital things, he adds, is understanding that self-confidence helps with mothers’ ability to get into the real world and move up the economic ladder.
“We also address income enhancement,” Turley said. “We want to get people from just a meager income or sometimes no earnings to a place where they can afford an apartment on their own. This is a great definition of success—exiting and graduating the program and being in their own apartment.
“We want to have the mothers in self-sustaining independent living, and we track that for years,” he added. “We have about an 85 percent success rate in our exit program.”
This leadership course also stands out because over time, Turley hopes to offer it to the community at large and other nonprofit leaders in the greater Redlands area.
“The endgame is that we’re improving upon the program, expanding it, then offering it to other nonprofits who have people that could benefit from the leadership class,” Turley said.
Moving forward, the nonprofit will look to expand the number of live-in units on one site called Hannah’s Village.
“We’re going to increase capacity times four,” Turley said, “making it the largest exclusively single-mother-with-child programming the county of San Bernardino.”
This story originally appeared in the Press Enterprise, May, 2026.
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