A homeless mother in Hernando County has had one specific door to knock on since 2002, and as of this month, a different person answers it. Barbara Lemoine, who founded The Life Center of Hernando after deciding homelessness among local mothers and children was a problem she could actually do something about, is passing the executive director role to Carol Barber.
The Life Center isn’t a shelter in the overnight-bed sense — it’s a residential program built around teaching single mothers at risk of homelessness the skills to live independently: parenting, budgeting, holding down steady work, eventually running their own household without the program. Lemoine started it as a grassroots mentoring effort, turning neglected buildings into housing one at a time rather than opening with a grant-funded campus.
It’s a faith-based 501(c)(3) that takes no government funding at all — grants, corporate and individual donations, and volunteers are the entire budget. That funding model is also the honest caveat here: a leadership change at an organization with no government backstop carries more real risk than the same transition would at a county-funded agency, and it’s too soon to know whether donor relationships built around Lemoine’s two decades there transfer cleanly to Barber.
What hasn’t changed is the mission Lemoine set in 2002 — mothers who complete the program are supposed to leave able to stand on their own, not just off the street.
Photo: a residential street in Brooksville, Florida, by Daniel Oines, licensed CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.