Why safety and belonging are at the heart of the work
There is a particular kind of exhale a person lets out when they walk into a place and realize, sometimes for the first time in a long while, that they don’t have to brace themselves. That no one is going to ask them to explain, justify, or shrink any part of who they are in order to be cared for. At Abby’s House, helping a woman reach that exhale is the heart of our work. We offer shelter and a place to land, a path into stable housing, an advocate in your corner, clinical care, and a community to belong to. All of it exists to tell women who have been pushed to the margins one simple thing: you belong here, every part of you.
Our work has always been about making room for women who needed somewhere to turn and too often had nowhere. Some have been othered, oppressed, or harmed. Some have simply hit a season of hardship with no safety net. They arrive from every imaginable circumstance, carrying every kind of history. Abby’s House exists precisely for women like these, which means we can’t draw a quiet line around which women count. Our mission is to help women live self-directed lives of dignity and hope, and we mean all women. A promise like that is only as true as its edges. If we are not intentionally building safety and belonging for LGBTQ+ women, then we are failing the women we claim to serve, and the word โallโ becomes empty and performative.
The Women Who Find Us
Women experiencing housing insecurity and hardship rarely carry just one struggle. For many, more than one is true at once: poverty, racism, immigration status, disability, trauma, the realities of who they are and who they love. When these layer, each one makes the others harder to carry, and the weight falls hardest on the women holding the most at once.
For LGBTQ+ women those overlapping pressures translate into measurably higher risk. The data is stark. They face intimate partner violence, sexual assault, and homelessness at far higher rates than other women. They are more likely to be harmed, more likely to lose stable housing, and more likely to be met with a closed door when they finally reach out for help. For transgender and queer women of color, the danger climbs higher still, where racism and homophobia don’t simply add together. They multiply, widening the danger, the isolation, and the barriers standing between a woman and safety. But I name these realities carefully, because numbers can flatten people. The women behind them are not data points or cautionary tales. They are whole human beings, funny and exhausted and fierce and grieving and hopeful, failed by systems that should have protected them.
Dignity Without Conditions
At Abby’s House, no one has to earn their welcome; it comes without conditions. In a world that constantly sorts people into the deserving and the undeserving, that kind of welcome is its own quiet act of defiance. Our values say it plainly: we affirm women of all races, ethnicities, ages, national origins, sexual orientations, disabilities, and gender identities. And we stand behind that with the same unshakable conviction as the foremothers who built this place.
In practice, dignity is made of small, concrete things. Itโs using a woman’s correct name and pronouns without making it a project. It’s not asking anyone to narrate or defend their identity as the price of a bed. We don’t hand out dignity on a sliding scale here… It’s your birthright.
Safe Enough to Exhale
We talk a lot about safety in this field, and we don’t always notice that the word means different things to different people. For an LGBTQ+ woman fleeing violence or navigating homelessness, safety isn’t only freedom from physical harm. It’s freedom from harassment, from misgendering, from the quiet erasure that comes with being treated as a problem to be managed rather than a person to be helped. This is especially true for transgender women, who are too often refused a bed at other shelters, or placed in ones where they’re endangered rather than protected.
A system that keeps a woman physically housed while leaving her exposed to that kind of harm has not actually made her safe. Housing a woman who still must hide parts of who she is, all day, every day, is a hollow kind of safety, and she knows it even if the system doesn’t. A full census may look like success on a report, and anyone who knows me will confirm I can nerd out on a good spreadsheet for hours. But a full bed has never once told us whether the woman in it feels safe enough to sleep. Providing a roof is only the beginning. That deeper safety, the kind a woman can feel in her body, is what I’m in this for.
“So much of survival is making yourself smaller to fit what’s safe, and most of the women I work with learned that a long time ago. What I want is to give them the opposite: a place big enough for all of who they are, where they never have to shrink again.โ
Community Belonging Heals
One of the deepest injuries of being pushed to the margins is isolation. When you lose your footing, by poverty or violence or rejection, you often lose the very things that hold a life together: family, friends, the ordinary web of people who would notice if you disappeared. For many LGBTQ+ people, that loss is intimate and specific. It’s chosen family scattered, the front door closed by the people who were supposed to keep it open.
So, when Abby’s House rebuilds community, it’s doing more than providing services. It’s giving something back that was taken from them. I’ve watched women from very different backgrounds, different ages and faiths and races and histories, find real common ground in the everyday work of simply being human together. Nobody is reduced to a single label. They’re just people, sharing a kitchen, a hard week, a small win. In a world that keeps people isolated and afraid of one another, that kind of belonging matters more than almost anything else we do.
A Living Practice
Belonging is easy to talk about in the abstract. What I care about is what it changes about the actual work. It starts at intake, where no woman has to out herself or explain who she is to get help. It means every person on our team knows how to offer affirming care, because a woman shouldn’t have to hope she draws the right staff member on the right day. And it shapes who we refer her to, since handing a woman off to a partner who won’t respect her can undo months of trust in a single afternoon.
It also means holding a firm line. Discrimination and hatred have no place here, toward anyone, for any reason, and we hold to that even when it’s hard. A woman can’t feel safe in a place that lets some people be treated as less. We treat this as a standard worth protecting, and we guard it closely.
The Footsteps We Follow
We are named for Abby Kelley Foster, who was, frankly, the kind of woman who got thrown out of a lot of rooms. An abolitionist and women’s rights crusader, she lived by a motto that could be ours: go where least wanted, for there you are most needed. She’s my kind of woman. We’d have recognized each other on sight, probably from across whatever room we were both about to get walked out of. Staying quiet about the things that matter has never been my strong suit either.
That conviction is the ground we stand on. In 1851, speaking in Worcester, she told the women who would carry the movement forward that “bloody feet, sisters, have worn smooth the path by which you come hither.” To me, that means none of us arrive on our own. We walk a path cleared by the sacrifice of those who came before, and we owe it to them to keep clearing it for the women still finding their way to us.
Abby’s House was built by a woman who was told she had no business building it. When Annette Rafferty set out to open this magical place fifty years ago, there were only three shelter beds for women in all of Worcester, and the people with the power to help had already said no. She did it anyway. What she understood, and what we still believe, is that a woman’s dignity isn’t up for debate. We inherited that, and we intend to keep it that way.
That’s why we don’t treat any woman’s safety as optional, and why affirming a woman’s full self, including who she loves and how she identifies, isn’t something extra we do. It’s simply what it means to be a refuge. Around here, we say the porch light is on. Itโs a beautiful promise, and one that asks something of us. A light on the porch isn’t worth much if the door only opens for some women. We are only as much a refuge as we are for the woman the rest of the world keeps turning away.
Where I Belong
Inclusion, done right, isn’t a line in a policy handbook or a training you sit through once a year to check off a box. It’s a thousand ordinary choices woven into daily practice: who gets a real welcome, whose name is said right, who is told without hesitation that there is room for her here. That is the difference between surviving a place and being held by one. It’s a small thing, and it’s everything. Everyone deserves a place to land that never asks them to leave part of themselves at the door. There’s a moment I live for, when a woman realizes she’s found that place, and stops bracing because she’s finally somewhere she doesn’t have to.
I’m exactly where I’m supposed to be, doing the work I was put here to do, alongside women whose strength humbles me and whose trust I will never take for granted. I am grateful to witness all of it, the hardest days and the hard-won triumphs both. The porch light is on, and it always will be, so that every woman who finds her way here can know, all the way down, that all of who she is belongs.
About the Author
Chelsea Levine is the Senior Director of Clinical and Stabilization Services at Abby’s House, where she leads support and stabilization across advocacy, clinical care, Shelter, and the Day Resource Center. She has been with Abby’s House for nearly three years, and while the reach of her work continues to grow with the expansion of her new role, the heart of it has not changed: helping women rebuild steady, self-directed lives with the full weight of this community behind them. What drives her now is the belief that every woman deserves to be met as a whole person, with care that holds all of her at once, her health, her history, her hopes, her healing, so she can step into the fullness of her own life.
For Chelsea, the work rests on a simple conviction: that healing is not possible without safety, and safety is not possible without belonging. In her years supporting women in crisis, whether domestic violence, housing instability, trauma, or all of it at once, she has seen firsthand what it takes from a person to walk into a place and not know whether they’ll be accepted. That toll falls hardest on women who carry more than one marginalized identity. For LGBTQ+ women especially, the fear of being cast out isn’t hypothetical. It’s been taught, again and again, by the very systems meant to help them.
“I have lived the painful cost of homophobia and judgment for who I love. My family has suffered for other people’s cruelty and bigotry; in ways I never could have imagined. Yes, even in the 21st century. Even in Massachusetts. It has taken our safety, our sense of home, our belief that we belonged. That experience is exactly what fuels me. It’s why I am so fiercely committed to making sure every woman who comes to us has the chance to be not just tolerated, but truly seen, embraced, and celebrated.”
That belief shapes how Abby’s House approaches support and stabilization services. This is work grounded in accompaniment. In staying. In making sure that every woman who walks through our doors knows that all of who she is, is welcome here. So many of the women we serve have rarely had an institution reflect that kind of worth back at them. Being seen and invested in that way is at the core of our mission.
This piece touches on difficult experiences, including violence. If you or someone you know needs support, please reach out to a trusted person or a local crisis resource.