SANTA ANA, Calif. – It was nine years ago when Kristen Zampa decided to kick her addiction to prescription pills and turned to WISEPlace to gain control of her life.

WISEPlace, located in Santa Ana, is a nonprofit community of housing for unaccompanied women who are seeking help alone, without a spouse or children.

Zampa had just completed 90 days at a drug rehabilitation center when she left and relapsed the same day.

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“I had to go somewhere safe. My sponsor and my daughter both directed me to WISEPlace and I came here the next day,” says Zampa.

WISEPlace transforms the lives of more than 300 women each year by providing safe, affordable transitional, and emergency shelter. They also offer healthy meals, financial empowerment curriculum, and employment assistance to help women move from homelessness and hopelessness to a path of personal self-reliance.

There are case managers and counselors on site to provide personalized wrap-around services to help each woman overcome hardships that led to unemployment and homelessness.

“I remember walking down the hall for the first time and it just looked beautiful to me. For whatever reason, it looked beautiful to me and I felt like I was home,” says Zampa.

There Zampa learned how to use a computer and gained administrative skills that has helped her find jobs to support herself after leaving WISEPlace.

“Nobody should be homeless, but especially a woman by herself,” says Brateil Aghasi, executive director at WISEPlace.

Aghasi joined the WISEPlace team more than a year ago. She was drawn to helping women because she says she grew up with a hardworking single mom who made sure that she and her siblings would never become homeless.

“When you experience extreme poverty, you want to make sure that nobody else has to go through that. If you are in that situation, you want people to know that somebody cares, they are not alone and that life can be better,” says Aghasi.

WISEPlace was created in 1929. In 1987 it opened the “Hotel for Women,” a 19-room transitional housing shelter for single women. In 2018, WISEPlace opened an emergency shelter in their gymnasium to house an additional 60 chronically homeless women.

Recently, WISEPlace announced its $25 million partnership with Jamboree Housing Corporation. The corporation is an award-winning, broad-based nonprofit housing development company that develops, acquires, renovates, and manages permanently affordable rental and ownership housing throughout California for working families, seniors, and people with special needs.

Together, WISEPlace and Jamboree are working together to design and complete an expanded and fully modernized and compliant renovation of WISEPlace’s current 26,030-square-foot facility in Santa Ana.

The new facility will include 52-units of fully-furnished permanent supportive housing, a fully operational kitchen with dining hall, financial empowerment learning labs, dedicated wraparound service areas with private counseling and case management spaces, and a welcoming outdoor area complete with community gardens and space for domestic pets.

“For more than 90 years, WISEPlace has served one of the largest overlooked and underserved segments of our homeless population: unaccompanied women,” said Laura Archuleta, president and CEO of Jamboree. “This new community will allow us to permanently end homelessness for 52 vulnerable women, furthering both WISEPlace and Jamboree’s mission of transforming lives and communities through high quality, affordable housing. We are thrilled to join this exceptional community organization as we work together to address the unique needs of unaccompanied, homeless women in Orange County.”

Once the project is complete, WISEPlace will be able to help even more people like Zampa get back on her feet. Zampa now works as a logistics director at a chemical dependency treatment center in Orange County where she helps people let go of their addictions and volunteers every week at WISEPlace. She hopes to continue to use her life story as an example to help people regain control of their lives.

For more information about WISEPlace, visit the website here