Big Announcement!
Heyyy Friends,
I have to tell ya'll something.
We are closing our Unashamed Inc office.
Not the organization. Not the work. The office. The actual brick and mortar in Middletown that has been Unashamed's home for the last 5 years. Come November 1st, we hand back the keys.
And if I'm honest with you, for about a month I refused to hear that this was even happening.
Let me back up.
Unashamed started in 2018 with no plan. No five year strategy, no business model, nothing. I just wanted to help people in my community who were in need. Survivors of domestic violence. Single parents. People without stable housing. It fed my soul. That was it. That was the whole reason.
Somewhere in the middle of 2019, God started shifting the ground under me. I speak a lot about my own story of being in foster care, and someone asked if I'd ever considered doing this work with youth in care. Honestly? That was not the plan. I wasn't trying to put myself out there like that. But I prayed on it, and the answer I kept getting was clear. This is where I want you to go.
A year later it got even more specific. Not just youth in care. Adolescents and young adults in care. That's where Unashamed really became what it is now.
And from the very beginning, before we had a name for it, before we had a strategy, I saw a house. I saw us giving kids somewhere to actually stay. Somewhere that felt like home instead of a placement.
God has opened doors since then that I still don't fully understand. Our Imagine Me program has been running inside Albert J. Solnit Children's Psychiatric Hospital for five years now, serving both the boys and the girls units. We know that rhythm like the back of our hand. We have mentored many youth all over the state of Connecticut, helped adoptees find their biological family, provided virtual baby showers, and Christmas gifts to our most vulnerable population.
But for a couple of years, I kept telling my team we needed to leave Middletown. Move to Hartford County. New Haven County. Somewhere else.
Here's why. Our kids aren't here. Middlesex County doesn't have enough foster homes that take adolescents, so our young people get placed in other counties, in other towns, away from whatever roots they had left. And here, in this town, I have felt what it is to be a Black woman leading an organization in a space that doesn't make room for us. The grant funding goes where it's always gone. We are, as far as I can tell, the only organization doing this specific work with adolescent foster youth in this entire county, and still, we've had to fight for every bit of support we've gotten. Community Foundation of Middlesex County, and the Youth Prevention funds (Rep Kai Belton), has been the exception, and I am so grateful for them. But it has been hard to be of this town and still feel unseen by it.
I knew it was time to go. I just didn't move.
Partly because relocating is exhausting and expensive and I didn't have the bandwidth to think through all of it. But mostly, if I'm being honest, because I was comfortable. I was used to what we had.
Then May of this year happened.
God started, and I mean this with all the love and reverence I can, spanking my behind. Reminding me what Unashamed was always supposed to become. A home. Not an office. A home.
He said it plainly. It's time to close the office.
And I said, close the office?
I was not trying to hear that.
This office was the first brick and mortar we ever had. It represented something to me. Proof of what I'd survived and what I was becoming. Closing it felt like closing a chapter I wasn't ready to let go of. It felt, if I'm honest, like failure. Like I'd be the one who couldn't hold onto what we built.
But I couldn't keep being disobedient. So I emailed our landlord and told them we would not be renewing our lease. They actually offered us a discount to stay. They didn't want to lose us. And still, I knew I had to move.
Here's the part that undid me. Once I actually sat with it, I realized 95% of our work has never happened inside that office anyway. We go to the youth. We are in the field, in the hospital, in their spaces. Youth rarely come to us in our office. I don't fully know why I fought so hard to keep a space that was never really where the work lived.
Right now, we are in the thick of it. Boxes taped shut. Walls bare. It doesn't feel like closing to me anymore. It feels like unbuilding, so that we can rebuild something bigger.
Because once I told God okay, now what, He didn't waste a second.
He said, now you open Rooted.
Ya'll, I got scared. My husband and I bought our first home a year and a half ago. We are in our mid forties. And I'm being told we're about to take on responsibility for another house, one meant to hold other people's daughters. I have no direct experience running a residential home. I didn't know where to start.
What I kept hearing back was simple. Be still, and know that I am God.
So that's what I've been doing behind the scenes. Buried in research. Writing out, in real detail, who Rooted is for.
She's eighteen, maybe twenty two, maybe twenty four. She's had a caseworker since before she can remember naming one. She's moved enough times that she's learned not to fully unpack her bag, even when she wants to stay. She's smart. She's tired in a way most young women her age aren't supposed to be. She's aged out or she's about to, and the system's answer to that milestone is a folder of paperwork and a countdown clock, not a hand to hold.
She doesn't need someone to fix her. She was never broken. She needs a key that's actually hers. A room she doesn't have to leave when someone else decides it's time. Someone to teach her how to build a budget, keep a job, show up for herself when nobody's checking. She needs the chance to trust that stability is real and it's not getting snatched away from her again.
Rooted is where she gets that. Not a shelter. Not a placement. A home, with room to actually become who she was always going to be.
So many of you have been here since the very beginning. You've given money, donated items, prayed over this work, shared a post, voted for us in a grant contest, nominated us for an employer match. You have been building Unashamed with us this whole time, and I need you to know none of that was in vain. We are not stopping. We are unbuilding to rebuild.
We're hosting our Winter Wonderland Sneaker Ball on Thursday, December 10th in Meriden, Connecticut, and every dollar raised between now and December 31st is going straight toward Rooted. Our goal is $100,000.
I am doing this scared. I'll admit that freely. Am I kicking and screaming a little on the inside? Also yes. Do I trust God with this? With everything in me.
I'm asking you to put on your hard hat and build this with us. Give what you can. Come to the Sneaker Ball. Share this with someone who has the means to say yes to a young woman she'll never meet.
We're building something meant to outlast me, outlast all of us. Something that says a community showed up for the young women nobody else was fighting for.
Will you help us build it?
Love Always,
Sana Latrease
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