Keeping Families Together During Crisis

In 1985, when Reagan-era homelessness had become a crisis in the country, Steve and Iris Lazarian, and friend John Perkins, devoted members of a Pasadena congregation, sat down to answer a not-so-simple question: what happens to a family when they lose their home? Not just to the mother, or the father, not even just to a nuclear family, but to the generations beyond them. Most shelters split families apart by age or gender. Both Steve and John had been born into poverty, and all of them wanted something different – a place where parents and their children could stay under one roof while they rebuilt. That prayer became Door of Hope. And 40 years later, it’s still helping families in that same compassionate way.

“Our model is to strengthen the family so they need increasingly less support over time,” CEO Megan Katerjian explains. Families move through an average of 10 months of transitional housing in private units, then case management tapers as they stabilize. The model works: 95% of families remain housed a year after leaving, and 86% remain housed five years out. Door of Hope now serves nearly 800 families a year through shelter, homelessness prevention, and comprehensive support service programs, and by next year will have grown from 37 to 68 families sheltered nightly. “When you’re helping families,” Katerjian says, “you’re not just lifting one person out of poverty – you’re lifting the next generation, too.”

Transforming Lives Now and Into the Future

Few embody that transformation like Wendi Gaines. She arrived at Door of Hope after “the sudden demise” of her marriage, with three children under five and two weeks from starting a job at Huntington Hospital. “I was just in an emotionally bad way,” she recalls. Through Door of Hope’s case management, her youngest son was evaluated and diagnosed with autism – answering questions about his behavior she’d carried alone. She went on to work at Huntington for nearly 17 years, then returned to Door of Hope as its alumni case manager, guiding families through the same crisis she once survived. “I always throw in, ‘yeah, when I was a resident,’” she says, “and they always say, ‘Wait – you were a resident?’” That shared history, she says, “takes it to a whole new level.”

Faith runs quietly beneath it all – optional, never required, but foundational. That spirit is why Rev. Andy Bales, a homeless-services veteran who once fostered 30 children while leading Union Rescue Mission, called Katerjian one day and said, “Why don’t you come take a look at my home?” He sold it to help build Door of Hope’s fifth shelter, a 20-family facility now under construction, fulfilling what Katerjian calls his “long-time dream” of turning his house into “a home of restoration.”