Meet Sandra Clemmons. She moved to California from Ohio in December 2000 to be near her family. Sandra has been a God-fearing, Christian woman for as long as she can remember, but the combined pressures of low wages, high housing costs and near homelessness produced enough discouragement to lead her to a life of drugs and alcohol. She began drifting from dwelling to dwelling, from job to job, from assistance program to assistance program, with the relief she needed always just out of reach. When her father died at the end of 2001, Sandra used money set aside for rent to bury him. That turned out to be the straw that broke the camel's back.

Sandra realized that drugs and alcohol were dragging her down, and she wanted to quit, but by this time, almost everyone Sandra knew was homeless and using. She began selling drugs and sleeping in her car just to survive. In the midst of this, however, she received a referral to the Orange County Rescue Mission from a local church. But when she went to sign up for the Strong Beginnings Program, she discovered there was a one-year wait to get in. Sandra began to pray to be rescued. “God, where do you want me?” she asked.

During the 12-month period Sandra was waiting to be contacted by the Rescue Mission, God showed her more than once that He was listening. At one point, having fought her demons of addiction as best she could, Sandra became very depressed. “I might as well just get high,” she thought. So with $200 burning a hole in her pocket, she revisited an old haunt — a homeless community under a bridge — where she knew she could “score.” But when she tried to make a deal with an addicted acquaintance of hers, he turned her down — actually got angry with her because she was supposed to be cleaning up her act! “Drug addicts don't turn down somebody with $200 who's willing to spend it,” she recalls. “It had to be God!”

Finally, in January 2003, Sandra was contacted by Ray Green of the Orange County Rescue Mission. She had tried several recovery programs, but Sandra says that more was accomplished in her first meeting with Ray than all of the other programs combined. They began to form a plan to get her off the street, find a safe dwelling place, obtain education, get work, find affordable housing and establish stability. For the next 18 months, Sandra worked very hard and fulfilled every requirement made of her. The thing that impressed her most about working with OCRM, and the thing that was the greatest source of encouragement to her, was the fact that the final disposition of her circumstances was always brought before the Lord in prayer.

In December 2004, Sandra was accepted into the REstart Program, a collaboration of the Orange County Rescue Mission and the Institute of Real Estate Managers (Orange County), to pursue a career in real estate management. Although, in her own estimation, Sandra was “least likely to succeed,” she was the second one in her class to land a job and now works as the manager of a large apartment complex in Fullerton.

Sandra has come a long way in a relatively short period of time, but she couldn't have done it without people like you — people who are willing to invest their resources and provide “a hand up” for those in need. Thank you, and God bless you!