About

A Program Built From Experience, Not Theory

Fresh Start Housing didn’t start with a business plan. It started with a conviction: that people facing a hard turn they didn’t see coming, whether that’s incarceration, addiction recovery, divorce, or an unexpected crisis, deserve more than a place to sleep. They deserve a real path back to stability.

That conviction comes from lived experience. Before founding Fresh Start Housing, I experienced homelessness myself, and I know firsthand the cognitive and emotional weight that housing instability places on a person’s ability to think clearly about money, let alone plan for the future. That experience is the reason this program exists, and it’s the reason financial literacy, not just shelter, sits at the center of everything we do.

For over seventeen years, that conviction has shaped every part of how this program runs, from the length of the curriculum to the way residents are treated the moment they walk through the door.

What Makes Us Different

Most transitional housing focuses on the roof. We focus on what happens after someone has a roof: the habits, confidence, and financial footing that determine whether stability lasts or slips away again. Every resident works through a 15-month curriculum built around financial literacy, not as a single class, but as the throughline connecting employment, savings, decision-making, and independence.

We don’t move people through an identical script. We meet each person where they are, because someone rebuilding a relationship with their children needs something different than someone learning to manage a paycheck for the first time, and a program that pretends otherwise helps no one.

Where We Are Today

Fresh Start Housing currently operates from Richmond, Indiana, with capacity for 9 residents at a time. The financial literacy curriculum at the center of the program, developed and refined over more than sixteen years, is now taking shape as A Fresh Start Method, a framework other organizations can adopt to bring this same approach to the people they serve.

Our Commitment

We believe financial literacy is a form of human capital, not a checklist. We believe support and accountability have to travel together. And we believe no one is unreachable, they just need to be reached differently. Everything on this site, and everything inside this program, traces back to those three commitments.