Years later, Desneige VanCleve still won’t eat pancakes.
After all, when that’s all you eat six months out of the year for much of your childhood, it’s not something you exactly crave as an adult.
In fact, she’d just as soon take the two college degrees she’s earned and the beautiful family she’s helped create and put that impoverished childhood behind her. Way behind.
But, she says, God doesn’t work that way.
“This is not what I wanted to do with my life,” said the 30-year-old mother of three whose vision of opening Hendersonville’s first homeless shelter for single moms recently became a reality.
“But God helped me realize that nobody gets rescued from the pit to get to stand outside and wave to those still in it.”
VanCleve first shared her vision for Grace Place Ministry two years ago while working as the program director of Long Hollow Baptist Church’s benevolence ministry. She hadn’t been working at the church long before realizing that most of the calls her volunteers were taking involved single mothers trapped in poverty.
Eddie Phillips was one of those volunteers.
One day VanCleve decided to run the idea of opening a home where women and their children could live rent-free while they learned valuable life skills by Phillips.
“I felt somewhat compelled to try to help her fulfill her vision primarily because in working there as a volunteer I was surprised, and then overwhelmed, by how many homeless women with children there were in Sumner County,” recalled Phillips.
The two visited homeless shelters in and around Nashville together while VanCleve sought advice from other non-profit groups in the area.
One of her first stops was (continue reading at the Tennessean)