From a kitchen table to a statewide network, Connie Mercer has seen her Lawrenceville nonprofit, HomeFront, evolve to tackle family homelessness and poverty in central New Jersey. She started the organization 31 years ago, and now the founder and CEO is transitioning out of her leadership position to continue building on her legacy of advocacy.
“The time was right,” Mercer says of the change. “[There’s] a terrific executive management team in place right now. Our funding has been very solid. The community has been very generous during the COVID period.”
Mercer is stepping up on September 30 to support families who are homeless at both the state and national level, while she also assists HomeFront’s Board of Trustees in finding a proper successor. Her replacement will officially embark on the role of CEO on October 1.
“My heart has been aching, lusting to get involved with some of the bigger picture issues, because we’re changing lives one by one here at HomeFront and doing it very, very well. But there are a lot of bureaucratic reforms and legislative reforms that will make a real difference,” Mercer explains.
The initial urge to take action arose when Mercer, aghast with what she saw in a Route 1 motel, helped hungry children and their families living in squalid conditions. HomeFront’s first volunteers brought food to ensure that the homeless populations were not only adequately nourished, but cared for.
Mercer says that one year, they provided 300,000 meals, the services then encompassing a Meals on Wheels program and preparing food in volunteer, church, and communal kitchens. Restaurants also donated food, with Mercer estimating that the food is given to about 1,200 families a month.
“The more you deliver the food,” she says, “you see that they need so much more than that. You see that it’s the middle of winter and the little girl that comes out to get the food only has flip flops on.”
She adds that the children are so young, but they might have depression or carry a weight beyond their years — with circumstances beyond what a single meal could hope to remedy.
“We realized that what we were doing was terribly important, and we did it for a number of years, that people need so much more than just food and some nice people interacting with them — that they’ve got to claw their way out of poverty, they need real programs,” Mercer says.
This is where HomeFront’s “comprehensive wraparound plan” came to be. HomeFront is run through donations of money and resources, supplying housing, food, daily necessities, training, life skills, prevention services, programs, and more to families in need.
Their sheltering opportunities and outreach continued to develop along with the organization. In 2015, HomeFront revitalized a decommissioned military base across more than eight acres, turning it into its “Family Campus,” which houses its “Family Preservation Center,” a place where all kinds of assistance is administered on-site.
It accommodates 38 families in total, complete with dorm suites and social services to uplift, not discourage, disadvantaged households.
Adults are emboldened to seek out occupational opportunities with proper coaching and the career program, Hire Expectations, while children can also receive customized education and care at the Atkinson’s Child Development Center. This ensures that everyone has an outlet, and a safe space, to develop themselves further.
“We have all the support and services that they need there in one spot,” Mercer says, especially prideful of programs that supply costly items such as diapers.
Beyond the shelters, HomeFront’s sister agency Homes by TLC has created about 120 units of affordable housing. The nonprofit tries to eradicate the pitfalls that alienate and punish low-income families. Additionally, a focus is put on families being able to leave the shelter and get an apartment or house of their own. To aid the moving process, there is also a HomeFront FreeStore for furniture and goods.
Extending her passion for ensuring others have a roof over their heads, at the start of the pandemic, the HomeFront CEO and founder assembled the New Jersey Shelter Providers Consortium. The entity consists of about 122 statewide shelters “that on any given night, are sheltering about 9,000 people,” according to Mercer.
Prior to this established network, state shelters rarely shared resources or communicated for partnership purposes, Mercer says. But as a team, they are approaching the government about the implementation of mental health services and other needs, with the pandemic a much too difficult cost to handle individually.
“We figured out how to get training into our shelters, which is something that really hadn’t happened very much. We got $9 million of additional money in the budget for frontline workers,” Mercer says. “We made sure that people in shelters were first in line for shots and PPE. The government had sort of forgotten about us when they were putting together their policies because we never had a voice. Now, we have a voice.”
“There’s strength in numbers, and the shelter consortium is making such a huge difference,” Mercer adds. “The work that we do in running shelters is very complicated, from everything dealing with bedbugs, to dealing with people with severe mental health issues, to dealing with a very broken social service system — I just needed colleagues to talk to.”
But Mercer can always come ‘home’ to roost. She is guiding HomeFront through her lifetime of experiences and finding a new person to take her place. She has no doubt she will still be busy, whether it’s with the “two beautiful grandbabies” in Colorado that she is going to prioritize spending time with, or writing a potential book about the HomeFront model.
In terms of national influence, Mercer says that other groups around the country are eager to copy HomeFront’s successes, and may have already done so — thus, spreading the movement with a written guide from the originator herself makes the task easier to accomplish.
Over three decades, Mercer has observed key changes in family dynamics. Years ago, she says, fathers were often not in the picture for those receiving HomeFront services. Pivoting away from that, a higher percentage of families includes fathers than ever before, with the male figures also being heads of the household or single parents more frequently.
Another shift was that prior to 2020, HomeFront had helped nearly eradicate the presence of homeless children living in Mercer County motels.
“The pandemic has turned everything on its head. Once again, there are hotel families, because there just aren’t enough rooms in my shelter or out in the community,” Mercer says. “We as a community, and I don’t just mean HomeFront, I mean all of the social service agencies, have worked together very well to set up a system that’s quickly moved folks out of homelessness,” Mercer says.
“But probably the thing I’m proudest of is how HomeFront has really been able to successfully rally our Mercer County community to make a difference, and to care and to continue to care. So many communities across the state, across the country, are angry at homeless families, but here in our community, they want to make sure that the homeless kids have the same chance for a good future as the larger community kids do. I’m very proud of that. We set the groundwork for that,” she continues.
Just like the crisis at the motel ignited her desire to open HomeFront, there was a moment when Mercer realized she was inspiring something larger than life. Mercer has seen the growth of countless individuals from youth to adulthood, witnessing firsthand how children directly took control of their lives to pursue bigger dreams.
“These are the kids that were languishing in those motels that other people had written off as being ‘throwaway’ kids. Now, here they are, making a difference in the community. That makes me most proud,” she says.
Mercer is aware of her impact, and others are, too. The latest HomeFront press release says in its overview that she was “honored at the White House during President Obama’s administration, received an honorary doctorate from Princeton University, and was inducted in 2019 into the NJ Hall of Fame for Housing and Economic Development.”
But a large portion of the world does not register how easy it is to cross the line into poverty, particularly during the pandemic, when government agencies closed down and brought about unprecedented complications.
“People out there just generally don’t realize how close to the edge so many people are. When you miss four paychecks because you’re homeless, because you’re home sick, or because one of the two providers loses a job because their restaurant closed down, [they don’t know] how little it takes to throw people off,” Mercer says.
Mercer acknowledges Margaret Mead, a cultural anthropologist and author, whose quote captures what she called HomeFront’s enduring creed, motto and inspiration: “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed, citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.”
“I believe that firmly, and I’m very proud that HomeFront was able to mobilize those volunteers to make the world a better place,” Mercer says. “I hope for HomeFront that it always is a model of how to help homeless families get through the horror of homelessness and move on to self-sufficiency.”
HomeFront, 1880 Princeton Avenue, Lawrence. Donations in Mercer’s honor can be made by credit card or check to the Connie Mercer Fund at homefrontnj.org/donate-conniefund. 609-989-9417 or www.homefrontnj.org.
Connie Mercer of HomeFront.,
