Being homeless is never a good thing. Being homeless with children… well, that’s a whole ‘nother level of bad. and here’s a story where a simple question changed some lives.
A woman approached police sergeant Heather Kolke in the parking lot of an elementary school in Walled Lake, Michigan. She had a question for the officer, and what she asked her caught the officer off guard.
The woman, Erin Harrison, looked concerned… scared. But she asked Heather if it was illegal for her to sleep in her car with her kids while parked outside their school.
What a question. Heather just had to answer with another question…. What exactly was going on in Erin’s life? Then Erin shared her story with the officer. She and her 8-year-old twin girls were homeless with nowhere else to go. Erin wanted to keep her car parked at the school to make sure her girls would be there everyday.
Erin told Heather she lost her home went the rent went up. She had a job at a local McDonald’s and was saving up for some housing and had no money to buy anything for her daughters’ birthdays, which was the next day.
Heather was a mom too, and she knew she had to do something. So she reached out to her fellow officers for enough money for the family to stay at a hotel for awhile. And she also made sure that the young girls, Hayden and Abiggale had a party for their 9th birthday. This inspired the city’s mayor to reach out to the community through a news channel to help the family.
When a father and his children watched the report, his children asked if they could help Erin’s family. They even donated their allowance savings of $350 to the family. He was a business owner, so he called other business owners. And they all pitched in. In a very short time, more than $2,500 was raised for Erin and her daughters.
One business owner even offered to take Hayden and Abiggale on a thousand-dollar shopping spree.
Says a very tearful Erin: “It melts my heart to know there are people out there who care. I want to say thank you from the bottom of my heart. It means the world to my girls to be able to get so much.”