Gerri

On paper, Gerri had built the kind of life many people spend their whole careers chasing.  She was an executive at a global investment bank, living in a high-rise apartment, and traveling internationally. 

But when the pressures of her demanding job collided with the loss of both her parents, Gerri found herself navigating grief and stress on a scale that she hadn’t faced before.  She turned to alcohol as a way of coping, and over time, that coping mechanism reshaped her circumstances.  She lost her job and her apartment, and nearly everything she had built began to shift beneath her, until she eventually found herself in an emergency shelter.

“I didn’t know life could be that low,” she says.

Determined to recover, Gerri sought out detox programs and found an ongoing source of community and support through Alcoholics Anonymous. That foundation of consistent effort quickly paid off. In 2007, it led her to Project Renewal’s Geffner House, a supportive housing residence where she secured her own apartment.

Gerri has now called Geffner House home for fifteen years.  She has found community and partakes in Project Renewal’s Helping Older People Engage (HOPE) program, which is an on-site occupational therapy group.  In her own words, she describes the shift to permanent housing plainly: “As I was coming out of shelter, I was just trying to survive.  When I got to Geffner, I slowly got comfortable, and I realized there were things to smile about again.”