Inside the House (Ep. 1): Freedom House Ministries Executive Director Jennifer Schmohe

 

Inside the House — Episode 1: A Conversation with Jen Schmohe

A Freedom House Ministries podcast production, exploring all things homelessness — the successes and the challenges. We interview guests from Freedom House Ministries and the broader community for a holistic view of what homelessness really looks like.

Host: Today’s first guest for episode one of this podcast is Jen Schmohe, our executive director. Jen, thank you for joining us.

Jen: Thank you.

Host: If you could, for our viewers and listeners, give a bit of a history of your journey into homelessness work and the people you’ve helped along the way.

Jen: Sure. I’ve been working in this genre of homeless assistance — whether it’s families or singles, programs or direct service — since about 2008. So we’re coming up on almost 20 years. I’d love to say a lot of things have changed, but really, they haven’t. At the core of it, if I look for patterns, humans are always at the center. There’s the human story, and humans are complicated, and the conditions they bring with them are complicated. As long as that’s a constant, I think we’re always going to see some form of housing instability. Fast forward to now, and we’re seeing a lot of external factors pressing on that and changing it.

That’s my historical, career-level perspective on the challenges of helping people navigate homelessness. I first saw a lot of this when I was working in the computer lab at the job center. I was a trainer, helping people with resumes and cover letters, and I’d have men and women come in and give me the same address every time. I’d ask, “What’s this address?” and it would be New Community Shelter’s address — this was before they had their own computer lab, so they’d come to us. That’s where I first got exposed to the challenges of homelessness: the job loss, the transportation issues, and co-occurring things like mental health and addiction. All of those factors are still part of the conditions we face now.

Host: You mentioned the human being behind homelessness. Can you touch on that? When we give tours or talk with community members and donors, homelessness carries a stigma in the community — we all understand that. But there’s the human being behind it: mothers and fathers and kids residing in shelter, and hundreds on the waiting list. Can you speak to that human connection piece?

Jen: Yes. For us at Freedom House, it’s really important — for me, a core value is that we see each person as a unique individual who brings their own experiences and, hopefully, their own dreams. A lot of times, people have been stuck in survival mode for so long that we just need to help them flip the switch to, “What would it take for my family to thrive?” Sometimes that thriving feels almost unattainable, because they can’t wrap their heads around the idea that they deserve more or could even reach for more. That’s where supportive services like success coaching become critical — but also the other staff who get to have a hallway conversation, a lunch table conversation, or just be the shoulder someone spontaneously leans on. That’s why it’s so important that we’re all equipped and bought into that value of showing up for the people we serve.

Host: Can you touch on the voucher situation in the community — explain it as best you can, and how we’ve had to shift?

Jen: The voucher system — I’ve always had a love-hate relationship with it, I’ll be honest. I love the idea of it as a safety net to help someone transition from one situation to another. Unfortunately, over the years it’s become more of a net that keeps people at a level of complacency: “This is good enough. I don’t have to make more money because my housing is provided for me at this level. If I make more, it might go away.” That’s, in a nutshell, how the subsidy works.

In our community, we’ve seen some overextension of the voucher, and it hasn’t been getting used. As a result, we’ve been cut back from a budget standpoint — our community is getting fewer dollars to fund the vouchers, while the cost of housing keeps going up, which also eats into the budget. As a consequence of those two co-occurring factors, the Brown County Housing Authority has closed the individual housing voucher system.

This is significant for us because in 2025, over 80% of our households left shelter because they had a voucher. When someone has a voucher and finds a landlord willing to accept the assistance, they only pay 30% of their income toward the housing unit. So a unit might cost $1,400 a month — if someone’s making $2,000 a month, they’d only contribute about $600 of that $1,400 in rent, which makes it far more affordable. Now, with that gone, it’s very difficult for us to connect people to housing they can afford, because they’d need to earn over $26 an hour to afford $1,100 to $1,400 in rent.

Host: The next question I have is: “Just go get a job.” That question comes up in the community from people who may not understand homelessness and think a full-time job will fix everything. Can you speak to that — especially in relation to family homelessness, since it’s not just about employment?

Jen: Yeah, and I think the whole idea of “just get a job” doesn’t only apply to people while they’re staying with us — it follows them even after they’ve left the stability of a shelter. Having and maintaining employment can be difficult, especially for families, when they have children with child care needs or special needs, and parents are often impacted by their children’s behaviors. We send the kids to school, but maybe a child is having a hard day, and now the parent gets called out of work. Employers have a product to deliver and need their staff there, and pretty soon employment is in jeopardy. Then the rent becomes in jeopardy — it just snowballs.

There are other barriers, too: Do we have adequate transportation to get to work? Do we have adequate resources for clothing for the children? It becomes all these complicated, layered problems, and “just get a job” sounds very dismissive of that complexity. This is something that has stuck with me for a long time in my profession, whether navigating it with my own staff or with the families we serve. I don’t know that there’s ever a golden solution — even in a two-parent household, where you might think things would be easier, there’s another layer of complexity: a relationship to manage. It’s just complicated.

My best advice to anyone who has that kind of thought process about the solution is: get a little more proximate to people who are experiencing real problems, so your heart can be tenderized for what they’re facing. People can do that — they can come to Freedom House and take a tour, they can volunteer.

Host: Can you talk about the different ways the community can be involved — from our success coaches (not case managers, success coaches) to volunteering, donating, advocating, and staying connected? What are some of the most effective ways you’ve seen people get involved?

Jen: Yeah, I think you hit the nail on the head — there are lots of different ways. I always bucket them into two categories: tasks, and heart or relationship. Our community is very generous; we have a lot of volunteers and we’re known for that. But there’s a dividing line — some people are comfortable washing windows, washing dishes, showing up, serving a meal. That’s great, and we need that. But we also need people willing to come alongside folks, listen to what’s going on in their lives, and develop relationships — be a supportive ear.

If we zoom out and think about what’s going on culturally in our world, it’s very much “provide for yourself, do for yourself.” We’ve lost that sense of multi-generational caretaking. A lot of people have relationships that have splintered, so they’re not as connected to family and don’t have the natural support systems that maybe our parents enjoyed growing up in the ’70s and ’80s. It was a different time. So now we have to look for ways to create those supports artificially. Some of the best models I’ve seen leverage volunteers with tender hearts — sometimes coming from their own journey of broken relationships, of needing that extra neighbor who could provide last-minute child care, or the guy across the street who knows how to fix a flat tire.

Those are the kinds of volunteers we want to seek out and step into over the next six months — folks looking for volunteer opportunities at a deeper level, in the goal of family stabilization. That will be carried out through a collaborative project with Safe Families for Children. They’re already equipped as an organization — that’s what they do: recruit, vet, and train volunteers. Through this collaboration, we’ll connect people so we can support families while they’re here and after they leave, with the goal that the support they got here continues once they’re out — until eventually it just folds into how they do life, much like our own natural family or friend supports.

Host: I think that’s one thing I’ve learned in my time working in homelessness — the difficult part isn’t necessarily being in shelter. It’s the “after” part, being back on your own. Everything you’ve been taught or learned while in shelter, you now have to do on your own. It’s those relationships and connections — built while you’re here, or with volunteers or other organizations — that help you stand on your own, with your head held high, once you’re back out in the community.

Jen: Yeah. There are two things people call a “service cliff” — your support services here cliff off a bit, and we’re trying to do a better job of maintaining up to 12 months of frequent contact with families once they leave. But there’s also the financial cliff. Your FoodShare support, for example, gets impacted once you get a job, as it should — but for some people, that’s a real struggle. FoodShare used to tell them how much to spend on groceries; now they have to decide that for themselves. That mindset shift is really the business we’re in: helping people through mindset shifts about themselves, about change, about how they see the world and how they can be part of it.

Host: That leads into my next question — here at Freedom House, balancing our expectations as an organization and our success coaching model with the family’s own agency, goals, and journey. There has to be real difficulty in balancing that.

Jen: It is very difficult. I’d say we lead with agency and choice. We sit with the family and try to understand where they’ve been and where they want to go. Sometimes where they’ve been is a difficult road to navigate, with real constraints on where they can go. If you don’t have some core non-negotiables in place as an organization, that can become a runaway train. So our core non-negotiable is that we start talking about you leaving almost the minute you get here — how do we start planning for that?

That might sound a little harsh to some people, but it’s really rooted in love, because we don’t want your story to be that you were here too long. Six months is the ideal timeframe we’re working with right now — we tell families, “We’re going to give you six months to start getting things lined up. Let’s backward-plan.” If in six months you want to be in a rental — and you want that too, not just us — what’s it going to take to get you there? Are we at zero income right now, or halfway to what you need? How do we start filling in the gap? That’s where the heavy lifting comes in for our success coach team: leaning into families’ desires and limitations, and connecting them to services that fill the gap so we can hit that six-month mark.

Host: Can you talk about how the conversation has shifted in the last several months to look at the whole family unit — specifically the kids — beyond housing, transportation, and employment, which are more adult-focused pieces?

Jen: Yeah, this comes from a place of realizing you don’t feel like you’re doing enough — there’s always more, right? It sounds, from the outside, like a heavy lift just to help an adult navigate all this. But we’ve all, as staff and as a team, been impacted at different levels by situations where we see a child vying for their mom’s attention, and mom just has nothing left in the tank to give. It’s heartbreaking, because that child deserves so much more — they deserve the mom who’s their biggest cheerleader, who greets them with open arms. Sometimes that’s just not possible, because of the pressure she’s under trying to lift the whole family out of the situation.

So we started looking around — who can we bring in to support these families? Because a core belief here is that we can’t be the answer for everything; we don’t want families here forever. They need support, though. Through networking — and honestly, a lot of circumstance — we came across an organization called Counting Stars. Their executive director and I had crossed paths several times, and one day the conversation shifted: she was serving families we had also served, or she had families she thought we should serve because they were living out of a motel and it wasn’t a good situation. It was really a melding of hearts and ideas — we said, let’s try doing this together. Now we’re looking at the whole family unit, under the broader topic of family stabilization.

Counting Stars focuses on supporting kids with special needs, and also on educating parents about what their kids need — because it can be really hard to understand that your child might be wired differently than your firstborn, or differently than you are. There’s a leap it takes to understand that, both cognitively and practically: what does this child need? Routine. Boundaries. Their staff work with both the kids and the parents to help make that happen.

Host: I imagine — you mentioned routine and schedule — if you’ve lived in your vehicle, in a motel, bounced around, and don’t know what next week will bring, just having the basics of a schedule can be a real benefit for the parent, the kid, and the family as a whole.

Jen: Absolutely.

Host: This is our 35th anniversary as an organization. We’ve grown a lot, especially in the last seven years. You’ve recently connected with some of our founders — can you touch on some of the history you’ve learned about our origin back in 1991, the shoestring budget, just making it work? What are some of the stories you’ve learned about how we started, and how things have taken off in the last few years?

Jen: Sure. I have a ton of respect for our founders — founders are pioneers. They had to cobble resources together. The first house they had literally looked like three houses cobbled together to make it work — no judgment there, that’s great. It was big hearts wanting to make sure they were providing services. The individuals at the center of that really had a faith posture — a strong belief that everyone should be seen the way God sees them: unique, an individual, made in the image of God. How do you come around them and help them reach their fullest potential? In 35 years, that piece hasn’t changed — it’s still strong and steady here, that we’re honoring people’s situations with dignity and love, loving them the way Jesus would, without judgment or contempt, and helping them find the best parts of themselves.

When I look at my own leadership and how I’ve stewarded that, that’s probably the piece I’m most proud of — that everyone on our team does a great job delivering that, in the way people are respected, whether it’s a resident, a client, or even in the interactions between staff. It’s all in that same spirit of honoring and dignifying people, and I love that part of it. I feel blessed to be at this intersection.

One thing I learned talking with one of our founders is that we used to have an actual church building, out near Denmark, on County Highway N. Ironically, I drive by that building two or three times a week because I have friends and family in that area. It was a strange full-circle moment when one of our founders and I looked at a map and I realized that’s where it was. He told me stories about how they used to use that space for church services, picnics, and gatherings — just creating community, inviting neighbors to come support the mission, along with the residents and clients they were serving at the time. It’s now owned by someone with no connection to Freedom House or the founders. I thought that was a really unique find.

Host: Two questions before we wrap up. In your time at Freedom House, is there a family you think about often, or got especially connected to, that you’re really proud of?

Jen: I’ll be honest — it kind of feels like a blur. I can’t believe I’ve been here over four years. Thinking about all the families and people we’ve served, there’s always an opportunity to build resiliency with folks, and when you see that resiliency happen, it stays with you. There’s one person in particular I still get to see, because she now lives at our Bridge apartments and is embedded in a lot of the other things we do here. I recently sat with her — but now I sit with her as her landlord, not as the shelter director. She shared her disappointment in watching someone else fail: someone she’d been in shelter with. She was disappointed because she feels we have so much good to offer people, and it was hard for her to watch someone not take advantage of it the way she felt she had — not in a bad way, but in the sense of really building on it.

I told her: I understand that, and I’ve felt that disappointment too. But I know God is probably disappointed in me on a daily basis, because I mess up too — but He’s always there, He’s faithful, He comes back, He still loves me. That’s our challenge: to keep loving that person as they are, still on their journey to turn their situation around. It’s a learning opportunity for that individual, too.

Host: I’ve always found it striking, in the conversations we get to have, how many people in these situations are so willing and eager to help others, even when they don’t have everything they need themselves.

Jen: That’s so true — she’s one of those people too. She’ll help and help and help, sometimes at the cost of her own benefit. She’ll give someone a ride, and another ride, and another ride, and you think, “Okay, where’s the gas money coming from?” And she says, “I’ll figure it out.” I really enjoy people like her. And then there’s the other, more disappointing side — we can only help people so far. They have to take the reins, take the initiative, and we just have to keep loving them while they figure that out, and hope they get there.

Host: Last question — I want to do this for every episode. I’d love for our guest to leave a question for the next guest. So here’s the context: I’ve always told staff, when coaching or encouraging them, that I want Freedom House to be the kind of place that leaves an imprint on everyone who comes through — whether they’re a resident, a volunteer, a donor, or a staff person. So the question is: what has Freedom House left on your heart, or impressed on your heart, through your interaction with us?

Host: I love that question — a great way to end episode one of Inside the House, a Freedom House Ministries podcast production. Thank you for tuning in, and we’ll see you next time.