Sarah Steward has big shoes to fill.
There is no question about that for the person chosen to take over from HomeFront’s longtime CEO and founder, Connie Mercer, who led the nonprofit organization in combating family homelessness and poverty for 31 years.
But Steward naturally stepped into them, bringing with her a recognition of the task ahead, as well as a message of timeless importance: Rather than focus on “replacing” Mercer, Steward had already been working alongside her to fill stomachs across Mercer County for seven years, equally nourishing minds and spirits as HomeFront’s COO.
HomeFront, based in Lawrence Township, announced Mercer’s transition back in March. In an April interview with U.S.1, the pioneer behind the area’s first family shelter shared her intentions to pursue “bigger picture issues,” such as legislative reforms, before passing the torch.
Following a national search for the best candidate to succeed Mercer, the HomeFront board of trustees “unanimously” circled back to the COO, a Ewing native who joined the team in 2016. When Steward began her new position on October 1, Mercer was able to move on to the next stage in her career, leaving the “front of house” operations in familiar hands.
Steward found her footing initially as a college intern for Democratic Congressman Rush Holt, who then hired her for various roles in his “government constituent services office, legislative team on Capitol Hill,” and his successful campaigns for the U.S. House of Representatives.
As Steward rose to be Holt’s deputy chief of staff and district director, she worked with him for more than a decade, both closer to home in West Windsor and in Washington, D.C. By the time Holt chose not to run for reelection after his loss in the 2013 Senate race, Steward was actively using her experiences to propel a dream of public service.
That same year, Steward found a new voice as a member of the Ewing Township Council, where her appointment at age 31 effectively made her the youngest person in local history to have such a designation. This gusto for government also earned Steward the title of council president. Steward easily won re-election to a new four-year term on November 8.
On her first day working for HomeFront, Steward recalls getting everything set up, which included a trip to the supply closet. She noticed that behind that very door, fate had seemingly stacked itself in boxes awaiting her arrival, as her own handwriting was already on each of them.
“When we closed Rush’s office, we had donated everything to HomeFront, so I got reunited with all my supplies. I have the same stapler on my desk,” Steward laughs. “It’s been an amazing time, and it was exactly what I was hoping for — something that was going to put my network and my passion for this community, specifically, into service.”
Steward recalls that Mercer expressed a certain satisfaction in the board’s eventual choice, the latter explaining, “jokingly, that she’s glad that they came to the right decision, because she picked me for this job seven years ago.”
“I count myself as incredibly lucky to be able to be here, to be doing something that means a lot to the community but also means a lot to me,” Steward says. “I realize that not everyone has the opportunity to do something they love every day, and I do — and I’m really grateful for that.”
Although Steward was “coming into the organization with a background in understanding the needs of our community and the support we can offer,” she says, the ability to learn HomeFront’s operations from the founder herself was an honor she never took lightly.
“Connie was our best case manager, our best fundraiser, our best public relations firm; she was so many things to this organization,” Steward says. “It really is going to take a team of us to continue her legacy.”
Steward says that HomeFront’s Family Campus — a sprawling site established in 2015 on the grounds of a former military base in Ewing — is the organization’s home base for meeting the needs of each family with, “depending on how you count them,” about 35 active programs.
They include: access to emergency housing; educational and child care; health and wellness; enrichment opportunities; partner agencies like WomanSpace; and “Hire Expectations,” which offers job training and career support.
“I think about Connie’s work over the last 30 years, and she built this amazing organization, and it has scaled up so significantly, but at the end of the day — and she would tell you this still, up until her last day at HomeFront — we do this work “family by family,” so having those educational, life skills, and career supports wrapped up in everything else is an important part that helps us to make sure that this change is lasting and long-term,” Steward says.
Mercer’s pivot to a broader reach beyond the day-to-day operations of HomeFront became possible when observing the organization during the COVID-19 pandemic, Steward says.
“Every organization always thinks, ‘How would we react if something truly terrible happens? Are we really designed, are we built right now, to withstand an incredibly difficult situation?’ We did — and came out, in some ways, even stronger on the other side,” Steward explains, with HomeFront “surviving and thriving” despite the conditions.
“[Mercer] realized that she really had built something that was going to last, that she had a really strong team in place to continue this work, and then it was the right time for her to change her role here a little bit,” Steward adds. “That’s an incredible compliment to me, and I take that to heart.”
Steward’s interest in the political sector was piqued by an American government class at Franklin and Marshall College, from which she graduated magna cum laude with a bachelor’s in both government and psychology. In 2018 she also completed her master’s in public administration at Rutgers University.
As of press time, Steward is still fulfilling her duties as an adjunct professor for Saint Peter’s University’s MPA program, as well as HomeFront’s COO, as the hunt for her replacement remains ongoing.
But even with a full schedule and new responsibilities, Steward maintains that HomeFront shares the same guiding principles as it did under Mercer.
“What Connie built here is an organization that can respond to whatever the greatest needs are for families in our community, so in some sense, the mission will remain unchanged,” she explains. “We are taking on this incredibly large challenge of trying to end family homelessness. That is an audacious goal, in some sense, but if you read our mission statement, it’s ending family homelessness, but it’s also lessening the immediate pain of families that are living in poverty or experiencing homelessness.”
“We’re always going to do those two sides of the coin, and we’re always going to respond to whatever today’s challenges are,” she says, adding that while those may differ from years prior, a focus as of late has been on the lack of affordable housing available.
Mercer started HomeFront in reaction to seeing families live in motels along Route 1, and she was able to drastically lower that number until the pandemic. Now, Steward says, “there is a real disconnect between the housing options available in our community and what families need,” with those buildings once again occupied by those in need of shelter.
“There are families living in motels in Mercer County right now, not because they wish to live in a motel with their children, but because there are no other options. With the limited funds they have, living in a motel is not a cheap way to live,” she says, adding that while HomeFront is proud to partner in helping develop these homes, the organization “alone cannot solve the problem, so it has real repercussions for everything else we do.”
“The reality is that families are living so close to the edge,” Steward says, attributing that to “economic factors” like rising inflation and an unstable housing market. The HomeFront hotline for those at risk of being evicted (609-989-9417 x141) has been receiving more calls than ever, according to the new CEO, and the lines at the food pantry are “longer than they were even a year ago.”
Steward acknowledges that the pandemic is a contributing factor to these numbers, but the increase in prices for basics like groceries or diapers can be a direct hit to a family’s monthly budget.
She says that while such a feeling might be shared by many at the checkout line for those hanging by a thread, or a single receipt, that same unexpected cost is a threat to safety.
“[What’s] always close to HomeFront’s heart, and such a core part of our mission, is our support for children. Kids have had, as we all know, an incredibly difficult time during the pandemic and afterwards, especially children that are in unstable housing situations,” Steward says. “We have seen really challenging situations with a lot of our children in their educational development, their social and emotional learning, just all the ways that kids were set back by the last several years. Then, you add into that the trauma of homelessness, of living in poverty, living in a motel? That is a very real, present concern for us.”
“We’re working hard to help give kids the tools to be successful long term, help them catch up academically, and make sure that as the world wants so desperately to move on from COVID, that we don’t fail to recognize that there are kids that are still living with the very present effects of that, and will for years and years.”
“If you look at HomeFront’s tagline, it’s ‘working to break the cycle of poverty,’ and some of that cycle breaking happens generationally and happens by the children in the family having a vision of a different life and the tools to get there,” she says. “Any parent with young kids, no matter their economic status, can tell you how tough this last couple of years has been — and for our families, even more so.”
Along with significant losses in conventional social, physical, and familial infrastructures, the pandemic exacerbated the systemic issues already facing those who are experiencing economic hardship.
Steward says that she understands the shift “to move on from COVID, but it’s something that we need to take more seriously about as a community and make sure that we have those supports in place—to make sure that we’re not going to have a ‘lost generation.’’’
She also highlights HomeFront’s “work to help families achieve their educational goals, and career and vocational support,” noting that while there are job opportunities, the real challenge is in “finding a job that pays [a] livable wage.”
Through Hire Expectations, anyone receiving HomeFront services can pursue tutoring, then acquire their high school diploma on-site, which can have a positive influence on earning potential. These programs are once again being held in-person after previously being offered online, with employers re-partnering as well.
As HomeFront works to “re-embrace and engage families” for future independence, Steward notes that “it’s not just about throwing somebody into a job; it’s about getting somebody into a career that will help them earn enough to support their family long term. That is a challenge right now, just because the labor market has changed so much, but that’s still really core to our work here.”
HomeFront is also making strides in areas such as data collection, which will add dimension to the nonprofit’s work through a federal grant from the Administration for Children and Families’ Office of Planning, Research, & Evaluation (OPRE).
The Family Self-Sufficiency Demonstration Development initiative, Steward adds, “will help better assess the impact of our work,” because although HomeFront has collected data in areas like the number of lives touched since its inception, the organization is now one of 20 nonprofits given the tools to develop its internal capacities for doing so.
By giving these anecdotes a way to apply nationally, Steward is “confident” that HomeFront would be able to assess the best practices for what works, what might be overlooked, or what is a “component” in care, such as a lack of adequate transportation.
“If our goal here is to clearly create lasting change, long-term self-sufficiency, then we need to measure and quantify that better,” Steward explains, calling this a rather big “headset change,” but part of the organization’s commitment to “become an organization that’s driven by evidence and embracing that at all levels.”
“Our community is incredibly generous; I want to be able to show them the impact of the dollars that they donate, or the items that they give, or the volunteer hours that they give to us,” Steward says. “It’s important for our public-facing work, but even more importantly, I think it’s going to help us really hone in on what about our work is impactful.”
As an example, she mentions that HomeFront has “a relatively small program where if someone donates a car to us in good working order, we will, in turn, give that car to a family that is in great need.”
Steward recalls a case where a vehicle was given to a mother who could not take on a promotion at work due to the long commute and travel barriers, which not only “made an incredible difference in that family’s life,” but stuck with Steward.
The federal Administration for Children and Families program will help to possibly replicate the Family Campus model “across the country,” because while providing shelter is important, she stresses that the ability to tailor services to families in a comprehensive, effective manner can be just as vital for success.
“If we can help somebody in Oklahoma City embrace a model that’s going to help change lives there too, that multiplies the impact of what Connie did here and shows, I think, how effective the model that she developed here can be in other places,” Steward says.
ACF’s program, according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services website, is “to identify approaches that more efficiently and effectively serve families and children with low incomes.”
“[ACF has] finally realized that no nonprofit has the internal capacity to do work like that. If you donate a dollar to HomeFront, I’m putting almost all [of] that dollar directly into client services. There is no room in our budget, normally, to hire somebody to focus on this,” Steward explains. “What they realized is [that] they have to help organizations develop that internal capacity.”
Through an ACF grant, HomeFront hired a new director of innovation and evaluation, Ria Brij, who is guiding staff in growing their skills so, as she explains, the team can eventually balance “data and evaluation” with “direct client services.”
The organization’s new prerogative will be to analyze the results, but Steward notes that there is always an inherent “danger” for nonprofits incorporating such a system without the proper care. To ensure they do “not lose the heart of what they do” or start serving numbers rather than people, she notes that HomeFront’s ambitions to empower clients, as well as inspire them to advocate for themselves, will always be a priority.
This can be seen through “creative” methods of outreach like ArtSpace, which Steward describes as a way for clients to become “immersed in the healing power of art,” but also one that “puts control back in the hands of those who have endured difficulties.”
“I didn’t realize in the beginning how much [ArtSpace] is about life skills, about finishing what you start, it’s about having a vision, it’s about believing in your own creative ability and your own worth. It’s about bringing something to life,” she explains. “It doesn’t connect for every person, but for the people that it does connect with, it can really be transformational — a way to process the trauma that’s happened to you, a way to turn something really difficult into something beautiful. At its core, that’s the reason that program exists, but it also, in small part, becomes a way that we help tell our clients’ stories.”
“When I think of my life, in public service, in government, in elected office, it is so obvious to me how marginalized so many of the voices are that we serve. I think a big part of our work is, ‘how do we switch that up?’” Steward continues. “The art and the creative programs here help do that in a really important way.”
She also wants to continue her own advocacy like Mercer, who helped launch statewide efforts for the benefit of families in New Jersey and continues to do so. Steward herself is passionate about expanding “HomeFront’s role in advancing racial equity and inclusion.”
As Steward prepares for HomeFront’s next strategic plan, she emphasizes how much of a “great comfort and asset” it is to still have Mercer as “part of the HomeFront family,” with her involvement unwavering despite the change in leadership.
“In some ways, the transition has been over the course of this year,” Steward says. “Connie and I have been preparing for this for many years. It is strange to not have her in the office every day, for sure, but it was so deliberate and planned that I think we really did this the right way…our number one goal throughout all this was to make sure that the incredibly important work that we do survives.”
“It’s different now than when Connie began HomeFront, because she grew this to be such a cornerstone agency in our community. On any given night, there’s 450 or so people who are under a HomeFront roof, in some sense,” Steward notes, with the organization’s legacy requiring HomeFront to be able to grow and meet demands.
“When Connie hired me, it was fully knowing that HomeFront had reached a point in its growth where, to sustain it and to continue to grow, it needed to be more structured,” she explains, adding that such implementation was a key part of her work as incoming COO.
Steward says that her background in government shaped her own approach to working side by side with Mercer, whom she calls the “dreamer and spirit behind our mission,” as well as the one with the original, boundless vision for the future of Mercer County families.
“When I came to HomeFront, I thought that I would hear these stories of families who had gone through an extreme event — a domestic violence situation, a house fire — or some sort of major precipitating traumatic event that led them to seek our services, and we certainly do hear stories like that,” Steward prefaces. “But far, far more common is this idea I mentioned before; it’s families that are living so close to the edge that one hiccup, one medical bill, one car wreck, puts them over the edge — and that is our friends and neighbors.”
According to a study from Empower Retirement and Personal Capital, “only 53% of Americans are in a position to handle an unforeseen $500 expense without worry,” which Steward applies to a local scope.
“That might be the gal on the checkout line, or the man behind the counter at the post office. It’s our community, and it’s our neighbors,” she adds, noting that as a lifelong resident of Ewing, she is confident in the compassion and concern people can have when informed of the proximity to similar statistics. “People don’t always know how to help or what the challenges are, so they turn to organizations like HomeFront, because they trust us to help channel that caring and those resources and their generosity to helping people in our community that need it most.”
“One of the most common things we hear on the hotline is folks saying, ‘I never thought it could happen to me.’ That’s why it’s really important to me, as someone who loves this area, this community here in central Jersey, that the work I’m able to help with at HomeFront is helping our friends and neighbors every day,” Steward says.
“That’s an incredible gift to me, because I recognize my good fortune and my privilege to be able to do something every day that gives me that sense of satisfaction. But more importantly than that, it’s a real chance to be of service, and I think that if there’s any through line in my career to date, it is the idea of being in service to the community,” she says.
“When I worked with Rush, that was one of his organizing principles, too, that our community can do great things. Government, in my view, is [what] we can do better together than separately,” she says, describing it as “an extension of the same idea — that our community cares, and they turn to when they need and they want organizations who can help turn that caring into action.”
Steward notes that she sees her work with HomeFront and her responsibilities in Ewing Township as “different ways to achieve the same goal.” She adds that serving the public “anywhere in the world” would likely be a fulfilling experience for her, but this ability to help others with HomeFront allows her to give back to where she grew up — then, to foster that same progress through taking action and “wrapping” families in new opportunities.
“When I think of all of our programs, and what we offer, everything is made possible by volunteers working with their time and their hands. It’s made possible by generous people donating their new sweater or their gently loved couch to a family that needs it. It’s people who are donating their resources to help those who are in need,” Steward says. “I think that’s some of the genius of what Connie built here at HomeFront, because HomeFront is not separate from our community; HomeFront is our community.”
HomeFront, 1880 Princeton Avenue, Lawrenceville 08648; 609-989-9417. Sarah Steward, CEO. www.homefrontnj.org.
Sarah Steward, the new CEO of Lawrence-based nonprofit Homefront, with her predecessor, Connie Mercer.,
