SAN DIEGO — October is Domestic Violence Awareness Month, and an organization in San Diego is helping young mothers build better lives.

Putting everything in its place gives Juanita Molestina a sense of pride in her work. She works at Home Start Thrift Boutique, a store that provides a supportive setting for young mothers to develop job skills and gain work experience.

Home Start is a nonprofit in San Diego dedicated to child abuse prevention and providing family-strengthening services.   

Molestina says she first came to Home Start to escape a domestic violence situation with her 3-year-old daughter. They gave her a safe and secure place to live through their Maternity Housing Program and gave her this job, where she’s learning all about retail and customer service.

“Having these great mentors here, like my managers Miranda and Alexis, I’ve learned so much from them. Having to work with clothing and shoes it’s really fun for me,” she said.

Alexis Leftridge is the assistant manager and knows firsthand how much working in the boutique can help women recover.

She says she experienced homelessness while pregnant and turned to Home to find a safer life and affordable housing for her and her son. She’s been working at the store for over five years now.

“It’s exciting, being able to have a place where he can lay his head and not have to worry about the consequences of living in a shelter, dealing with other people and not having privacy,” Leftridge said.  

The National Coalition Against Domestic Violence found that 34% of women and 31% of men in California experience some type of domestic abuse.

Laura Tancredi-Baese is the CEO of Home Start and says they help provide families with a safe and secure place to stay. She says the mothers who come to them for help come from a variety of risky or abusive situations, like poverty, domestic violence, lack of affordable housing, and unemployment.

“Many of them have multiple years of trauma in their own backgrounds and so they did not always come with the best foundation, but it can be changed,” she said. “So our child development specialist works with our young moms from the time they’re pregnant throughout the time until they might exit from the program.”

Tancredi-Baese says all profits from the boutique are reinvested back into Home Start programs, so they can help more at-risk families and children thrive and succeed with access to their services.

“They can learn new things, with the therapy with the counseling with the child development specialist training, they can change their own background which will help them change their child’s background,” Tancredi-Baese said.  

Molestina now lives with her daughter in their own apartment, and she’s going to college to get her cosmetology degree. She believes she would have eventually escaped her domestic violence situation, but having the help of Home Start allowed her and her daughter to get to safety faster.

“This just kind of gave me that push to better myself in a quicker way for me and my daughter,” she said.

Home Start also has a program called Bright Futures Candles, where their mothers create signature scents and candles to sell at the boutique.

Home Start will hold its 17th Annual Hallo-Wine Fall Festival on Saturday, Oct. 19, 2024, from 3 p.m. to 6 p.m. The Hallo-Wine Fall Festival is held every October in recognition of Domestic Violence Awareness Month. The event raises funds for Home Start’s core programs that provide critical assistance to children, families and individuals in need.