I’ve created this fundraiser for a close friend, Rochelle, and her two young children because right now, she urgently needs our help! She also wanted to be part of putting this together because it was important to her to be as transparent as possible about where she is, what she needs, and how the money raised will be used.

Rochelle has spent the last several years rebuilding her life and working toward something more stable for herself and her children. She has come incredibly far and is now close to an opportunity that could help turn all of that rebuilding into lasting stability. But several major needs are colliding at once, and right now, she needs a village to help her through this next step.

She has been invited to move forward as a candidate for The Gatehouse Career Path, a program designed to help women and their children build long-term independence through career development, financial education, budgeting and savings, accountability, community, practical life skills, and housing support.

Her move-out date is only a few weeks away, and she is still completing the remaining steps of the candidacy process. Most importantly, she is required to have a safe, reliable vehicle before she can move into The Gatehouse campus.

Transportation is her most urgent need. She needs a reliable vehicle for herself and her two young children, for everyday family responsibilities, and to expand her opportunities as she moves away from temporary assignments and toward stable, direct-hire employment.

At the same time, she needs to move her family’s belongings into storage and potentially bridge a gap between leaving her current apartment and moving into her next home.

Several major expenses are colliding at once.

The immediate goal is to help her:

We’re not trying to build this life for her. She is already doing that.

We’re trying to give her enough of a bridge to get through this transition, avoid the possibility of homelessness, and prevent another financial crisis from undoing the progress she has worked so hard to make.

How She Got Here

Before everything changed, Rochelle was building a career while becoming a mother to two children born just 17 months apart. In 2021, she joined Capital One Auto Finance, an experience she genuinely loved that gave her a strong professional foundation. After the semiconductor chip crisis led to layoffs across most of her department, she ultimately chose to stay home with her children. She loved that chapter and would never trade the everyday moments, milestones, or time she was able to have with them.

In June 2024, her life changed dramatically. She suddenly had to rebuild an independent life, making major decisions about housing, transportation, finances, returning to work, and her children’s changing lives, all while living far from most of her longtime friends and family, without the nearby support or financial safety net that can make a major life transition easier to navigate.

During this period, her brother’s brain cancer returned. She desperately wanted to be there through his second craniotomy and treatment, but the urgent need to establish her own independence, secure housing and transportation, return to work, and navigate ongoing custody matters kept her in Texas. She was incredibly grateful to make it home for what would become his last Christmas.

As his health declined significantly in 2025, she worked with her attorney to arrange an extended visit home with her children. They made it back before he entered the hospital for the final time, giving them one last evening together with her brother, her dad, and her children. She will always be incredibly grateful they had that time together. He passed away shortly afterward. She loved her brother deeply, and losing him was an incredibly significant loss in her life.

Throughout her brother’s experience with brain cancer, Rochelle spent countless hours educating herself about his diagnosis, treatments, clinical trials, genetics, and hereditary cancer syndromes, trying to understand as much as she could about what he was facing and what options were available.

That experience developed into a lasting passion for brain cancer research and hereditary cancer education. She hopes to eventually help other patients and families navigate complex medical information, understand their options, and make the best-informed decisions for their own families.

What began as a deeply personal need to understand became something she hopes to one day use to help other families.

Many of the decisions she made throughout this time had to be made quickly, with the resources available and based on what was possible in the moment, rather than having the time or financial freedom to consider what might serve her best long-term.

Rebuilding Became Intentional

Much of this chapter has been survival mode, with one urgent problem following another and decisions often based on what had to be handled immediately rather than what would create stability months or years ahead.

But Rochelle has been determined not to let survival mode define the life she builds from here. She connected with Denton County Friends of the Family, sought resources for herself and her children, returned to therapy, participated in support groups, found support while navigating grief, worked toward healthy co-parenting, and returned to the workforce.

Even before these major changes began, Rochelle had become more intentional about how she handled stress and the patterns she wanted to change for herself and her children. In January 2024, she made the personal decision to go alcohol-free altogether. It wasn’t because something happened. She simply wanted to make healthier choices, develop healthier ways of managing stress, change generational patterns of coping with life’s challenges, and model healthier patterns for her children and the generations to follow. Through everything that followed, she has remained committed to that decision.

She knows she cannot change what brought her here, but she can learn from it and make different choices moving forward. She isn’t looking for another temporary solution to the next emergency. She wants the knowledge, financial skills, career stability, and practical tools to build something sustainable.

She doesn’t want to keep getting better at surviving. She wants to build a life where survival mode is no longer the default.

Her Children Are at the Center of Everything

Rochelle’s children are at the center of nearly every decision she makes. Transitioning from being their primary caregiver to 50/50 parenting time was difficult, but she has worked hard to build a healthy, cooperative co-parenting relationship focused on giving them consistency, strong relationships with both parents, and the freedom to simply be kids.

Last year, she began researching schools and working with their dad to find the best fit. Together, they got the children into a highly regarded Texas charter school with a Cambridge curriculum, where they are now thriving.

For Rochelle, giving them a good childhood isn’t about making life look perfect or being able to afford every trip, activity, or extra. It is about what they experience, the people they are surrounded by, and what they learn from those around them. She finds creative ways to make ordinary days special and wants them to grow up surrounded by love, laughter, opportunities, and memories.

Most of all, she wants them to see that people can put differences aside when something bigger matters. She wants them to grow up knowing that we all need help sometimes, that accepting it does not diminish who you are, and that when you are able to give that kindness back to someone else, you do.

Giving back is already important to their family, and as they move forward, she wants it to remain a meaningful part of their lives and something her children carry with them as they grow.

She wants her children to see that difficult seasons do not have to define their future, and that the way you move through them can help shape the person you become.

Building a Stable Career

Rochelle has years of experience across financial services, mortgage servicing, operations, coordination, and property preservation. Since returning to the workforce, she has continued building that experience through contract and temporary assignments.

She is now focused on moving away from contract and temporary assignments and into a direct-hire position where she can build a long-term career with consistent income, opportunities for growth, and greater financial stability for herself and her children.

Longer term, she hopes to reach a place where she can also earn an income from the work she genuinely loves, including writing and creating, developing learning and training experiences for organizations, exploring new approaches to cancer education and research, and using what she has learned through her own experiences to create resources that help others navigate difficult life transitions.

Why Purchasing a Vehicle Outright Matters

When Rochelle urgently needed transportation after starting over, she financed a vehicle at approximately 20% interest. At the time, she believed it was her most realistic option, but the high monthly payment eventually became difficult to sustain.

During an especially difficult period in 2025, she fell behind. Although she resumed making payments and tried to catch up, she was never able to fully recover from the accumulated past-due balance, and the vehicle was ultimately repossessed.

That experience changed how she wants to approach transportation financially. Rather than replacing one unaffordable loan with another, the goal is to purchase a safe, dependable used vehicle in the $6,000 to $10,000 range, have it professionally inspected, and own it outright.

If she cannot raise enough to purchase one immediately, a month-to-month rental can provide the reliable transportation she needs in the meantime while she continues raising and saving the funds to buy the right vehicle outright.

For Rochelle, a vehicle is an immediate necessity, but avoiding another cycle of high-interest debt is also an important part of building greater financial stability moving forward.

Why The Gatehouse Matters So Much

Rochelle first pursued The Gatehouse Career Path this summer but was not accepted. She continued advocating for herself, clarified her goals, and was encouraged to reapply. This time, she was invited to move forward as a candidate.

The Gatehouse accepts fewer than 10% of applicants, making each step forward significant. After spending countless hours completing the candidacy process, she learned this past Friday that she had advanced again, this time to the background check and references.

For Rochelle, The Gatehouse is about far more than housing. It offers career development, financial education, practical skills, and a supportive community designed to help women build lasting self-sufficiency. It could give her and her children a safe, stable environment while she builds the financial and career foundation for what comes next.

What She’s Passionate About

Some of Rochelle’s favorite moments are the ones she creates with her kids, whether it’s art projects, little adventures, activities, or finding ways to make ordinary days memorable.

When she isn’t working or with her children, she is usually writing, researching, learning, or developing a new idea. She has written a children’s book and has a particular interest in emerging technology and immersive learning, including the potential for virtual and augmented reality in education, professional training, mental-health support, and resources for veterans and their families.

Her brother’s experience with brain cancer and a hereditary cancer syndrome also sparked a deep interest in brain cancer research, genetics, treatment, and clinical trials, particularly how overwhelming medical information can be made more visual, accessible, and easier for patients and families to understand.

At the heart of most of her interests is the same thing: learning, creating, and finding better ways to make complicated things a little easier for other people to navigate.

What She’s Creating

Rochelle is also creating a website where she plans to share more of her life stories, the things she cares about, and what she has learned from spending far too much of her life navigating crisis and survival mode instead of the stability and normalcy she is now working so hard to create.

She also wants it to become a place where she can offer practical tools, resources, and ideas that may help other people and families navigate difficult transitions of their own.

The site will explore:

She is still learning, researching, creating, rebuilding, and figuring out what comes next. She believes there can be real value in sharing what she learns along the way and turning some of the hardest chapters of her life into something useful for someone else.

There is far more to her story and what she hopes to create than we could ever fit here. When she’s ready to share the website, I genuinely encourage people to follow along.

Where the $20,000 Will Go

With her move-out date only a few weeks away, these expenses are immediate. We want to be transparent about what we are trying to accomplish:

A safe, dependable, reasonably priced vehicle she can own outright and avoid another high-interest loan.

A pre-purchase inspection plus any immediate maintenance, repairs, registration, insurance, or other necessary costs.

Storage for her family’s belongings while transitioning to a furnished Gatehouse apartment, plus help moving larger items.

Her final rent is already paid. This will help cover final utilities, groceries, necessities, and temporary lodging if needed before move-in.

A month-to-month rental may be used while she raises or saves enough to purchase the right vehicle outright, allowing her to avoid rushing into another major financial decision.

These are estimates, not fixed spending targets. Actual costs will depend on the vehicle and inspection, moving and storage expenses, and the timing of her housing transition.

Anything Remaining Will Go Into an Emergency Fund

The goal is to use these funds responsibly to cover the immediate needs above, while putting anything remaining, as well as any additional funds raised, into an emergency fund for Rochelle and her children. This would give her something she has never had for her family: meaningful savings to fall back on when an unexpected expense comes up.

For Rochelle, having savings means being able to handle the unexpected without one expense creating a domino effect. If one of her children needs something, the car needs a repair, or another necessary expense comes up, she wants to be able to take care of it without sacrificing another essential need.

It is part of helping build lasting financial stability and protecting the progress she is working so hard to make. Every additional dollar can help strengthen that financial cushion and give her family greater security moving forward.

Every dollar raised will go directly to Rochelle as the beneficiary and toward creating greater stability for her and her children.

What This Help Means

We’re not asking anyone to build this life for her. She is already doing the work to create lasting change. Throughout everything she has been navigating, Rochelle has continued working different jobs, including temporary and contract assignments, to support herself and her children. She is now pursuing direct-hire employment to build greater consistency, career growth, and long-term financial stability.

This help would give her the breathing room to get through this transition without losing the progress she has already made, while continuing to build toward long-term independence.

More than anything, Rochelle wants to reach a place where she can plan for the future instead of constantly responding to the present, and build a life she can be proud of, her children can be proud of her for building, and all three of them can genuinely look forward to.

❤️ Help Us Make This Possible

$20,000 can feel impossible when one mother is staring at that number alone. Across a community, it becomes possible.

Every amount helps, whether it’s $10, $25, $50, or more. But please know that donating is not the only way to help. If all you can do is share this fundraiser, we are incredibly grateful for that too.

Every share puts her story in front of someone new, and sometimes reaching the right person can make just as much of a difference.

Whether you donate, share, or simply pass this along to someone who might be able to help, thank you. Every bit of support means more than we can say.

She has worked incredibly hard to get this far, and she has a plan for what comes next. She just needs help crossing the gap between where she is today and the future she is working so hard to build.

Every contribution, every share, and every person who helps her story reach a little farther brings her one step closer to creating lasting stability and a better future for herself and her children.