'It's been a journey': Homes Bring Hope offers life-changing transition for Daytona woman

DAYTONA BEACH — By her own admission, Lillie Lovett endured hard times in her younger years, but this Christmas, as she gazes across the empty lot that will be the site of her family’s new home, a new and better future is on the horizon.

“I’m learning to be successful, developing goals to get to a better future,” said Lovett, 38, among the Volusia County residents who has found support from the Homes Bring Hope program dedicated to helping working families with lower incomes achieve the American dream of home ownership.

“It has helped me so much to be more motivated,” she said. “I’ve been knocked down before, believe me, but I’ve been able to get back up. Trust me, it's been a journey.”

A Daytona Beach native, Lovett grew up in the low-income Bethune Village public housing development.

As a teen, she began hanging out with a bad crowd that resulted in brushes with drugs and law enforcement, she said.

“When they say, ‘You live and learn,’ I’m one of those,” she said, flashing a hard-earned smile. “I got into real trouble, and I had to claw my way out of it.”

Family focus offered motivation to improve

The primary inspiration for Lovett’s resilience is her four children — daughter K-Seante, 22; and sons K’Neill, 17, Neill’vonte, 15 and Tarrence, 13 — whom she has raised as a devoted single-mother. It’s a family that recently has grown with the addition of a 2-year-old granddaughter, Jha’nya.

For the past eight years, they have lived in a cramped 900-square foot Section 8 voucher rental property in Daytona Beach as part of federal government's program for assisting very low-income families, the elderly and the disabled with housing issues.

During that time, Lovett has toiled as a fast-food worker and hotel maid, jobs that barely provided enough income to keep the family afloat. At the same time, however, she also managed to take and pass a yearlong course to earn a state license as a certified nursing assistant.

With that training, she moved out of the fast-food realm to her first professional job at Halifax Health Behavioral Services, where she now primarily works with child patients.

Stories of Hope: Prosperity program brings Daytona mother step closer to homeownership

That experience has been so rewarding that Lovett is considering the possibility that she might somebody return to school for training as a registered nurse.

Before embarking on that dream, however, she wants to settle her family into their new four-bedroom, two-bath home along a short side street not far from Mason Avenue and Clyde Morris Boulevard in Daytona Beach.

'We'll dress it up like it's our own'

Lovett's daydreams nowadays revolve more around interior decorating than a new career goal.

For nearly a decade in a rental property, Lovett has been so wary of incurring the loss of costly security deposits that neither she nor her children dared to hang any pictures on the walls.

“We’ll dress it up like it’s our own,” she said of the new home that she hopes will be built by mid-summer. “Where we are now, because I know it’s not mine, I don’t have any pictures on the wall, even though we’ve been there for eight or nine years.”

Offering a path to home ownership to hard-working individuals and families is the goal of Homes Bring Hope, an extension of the nonprofit Food Brings Hope founded by Forough Hosseini in 2007 to provide food and after-school learning opportunities for lower-income children.

Homes built as part of the program are located on lots donated by the City of Daytona Beach and private donors for a program that operates with the help of companies that also donate work and products to defray construction costs, Hosseini said.

The story of Homes Bring Hope: New Daytona Beach program offering extensive help to turn low-income renters into homeowners

Hosseini, who also is an executive vice president of information systems for ICI Homes, has long been an advocate for education and programs to break the cycle of poverty.

“The issue is that many hardworking people would never have the ability to come up with the down payment to buy a house,” Hosseini said. “When houses go on sale in low-income areas, the investors buy them for cash and rent to these individuals and it becomes a vicious cycle.

“The investor doesn’t invest money to make it look decent and the renter isn’t going to invest in it, because it’s not their house. The entire neighborhood isn’t going to be attractive for that reason.”

Home ownership 'brings stability' to neighborhoods

The crisis affects workers at area hospitals, such as Lovett, as well as teachers, firefighters, policemen and veterans who have seen the dream of home ownership remain out of reach, Hosseini said.

In Daytona Beach, Homes Bring Hope focuses on the 32114 ZIP code, which is not only the poorest area in Volusia County, but also among the poorest in Florida. According to 2020 Census information, 64% of children there live in poverty.

Home ownership can change those statistics, Hosseini said.

“It enables them (homeowners) to be better employees,” she said. “The children do better because the families are not stressed and they don’t have to move from place to place, to change the children's schools. We believe it brings stability to the neighborhood.”

For Lovett, it’s a welcome transition that has been a long time coming.

“I can’t wait,” she said. “I’m ready. I’m overly ready.”

About this series: The FBH Community’s mission is to foster community organizations that proactively work to eradicate the causes of generational poverty. FBH Community hosts programs such as Food Brings Hope’s KidsZone, TeenZone, FBHonors and Change the Code, Pierson Family Literacy, Homes Bring Hope and the FBH Prosperity Initiative to help hardworking families struggling with hunger, housing insecurity, underemployment, and low levels of literacy. Overhead is covered by the Hosseini Family Foundation, so 100% of donations go directly to the programs and families. Throughout the holidays, The News-Journal is highlighting the organization by publishing the stories of some of its young participants. To donate to the organization, or to brighten the holidays by donating a gift to a child, email info@foodbringshope.org.

This article originally appeared on The Daytona Beach News-Journal: Homes Bring Hope helps Daytona woman with dream of home ownership