Milagro House

Since 1998, Milagro House has provided education, housing, and support to women and their children experiencing homelessness. Early in Christina Duncan’s time as Executive Director, she received a call from a young woman who stayed at Milagro House when she was nine years old.

“They knocked on the door and the first thing the staff member said to this mom and her child was, ‘Welcome home,” Christina recounted. 

Over the phone, the woman told Christina how much the time she spent at Milagro House while she was young meant to her. She called to tell the employee who opened the door that first night many years ago that she had just applied to law school in hopes of working with women who were experiencing what her mother had endured.

“All of the women in our program have experienced poverty or homelessness or are in danger of experiencing that. Our model is really a two-generation model to serve and to support moms, but also to serve and support their children, so that we’re breaking that intergenerational cycle of poverty.” Christina shared.

Milagro House opened an organizational endowment through the Lancaster County Community Foundation in 2011. This endowed fund will support the organization, and the mothers it serves, in perpetuity as it grows over time. Establishing an organizational endowment creates financial margin so Milagro House can plan their fundraising proactively, instead of solely reacting to urgent funding needs.

“Long ago, when we first opened that endowment, the organization was much smaller and we looked at it as an opportunity to get our toe in the water,” Christina shared. “We’re privately funded and that means that we need to stabilize ourselves over the long term. So that’s why an endowment is very important. It’s part of the long-term visioning of diversifying our ability to support the growth of the organization and show that we’re sustainable.”

Milagro House chose to invest a portion of its flexible funding intentionally in an endowed fund, recognizing that any contribution made today would ensure future generations of women and their children are cared for.

“I hope that the endowment positions us to continue to have great partnerships and collaborations, that it takes some of the pressure off of fundraising for particular programs, and that in years to come, whoever is sitting in my position can be very thankful that a board, staff, and leadership team thought to do this decades prior so the organization will continue to thrive,” Christina said.