EVERY SUCCESS STORY IS A GREAT STORY
Glenise Hildahl
 
“The last time he gave me a black eye,” Glen Hildahl says, “I told my family I fell. They got tired of my lying to them, and they stopped helping me.”
Glen had spent five years in the relationship, enduring “every kind of abuse you can imagine.” She worked hard, and she was forced to give every paycheck to her partner. She had been beaten down, physically and emotionally.
At the time, she was living in Minnesota, where she was born and raised and where she spent the first 40 years of her life. All her family lived there. Her parents. Her little sister, Tami. Her daughter, Naomi.
“I was ashamed that it happened to me,” she says now, with some distance and perspective
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She experienced homelessness off and on while she lived in Minnesota, but she was near family, and it usually didn’t take her long to get back on her feet.
By 2002, she had escaped the abusive relationship and had fallen in love again. She moved far down the Mississippi River to be with her new partner in Memphis. She got there in November, a welcome respite from the impending Minnesota winter. But by January, he had left.
She knew no one else in Memphis. She was stranded.  With nowhere else to go, she went to “the Sisters,” as everyone called them, at the Missionary Charity Shelter. She is grateful for the support she received at the time—she describes herself as “one of the lucky ones who could get into a shelter and not be on the streets.”
During the day, she would often go to Calvary Street Ministry, a drop-in center. It was there that she first encountered the staff of the Memphis Health Center. Gwen, a nurse practitioner, and Tachina, a medical assistant, would come there every Thursday for an outreach clinic. Glen got to know them well, receiving medical treatment for hypertension. They suggested that she join the Consumer Advisory Board of the MHC. She followed their suggestion, and by 2005, she was the Board’s chairperson.
Six weeks after moving into the Sisters’ shelter, Glen had been able to save enough money from her unemployment checks to move into her own apartment.
But the apartment was in a volatile neighborhood. She was routinely awakened by the sound of gunshots. During her year in that apartment, she was robbed twice.
Slowly, her financial situation improved, and with it, the quality of her housing. Now she lives on the 9th floor of a secured building in an apartment she loves.
When I thank her for her openness and tell her what an amazing story she has just told me, Glenise says, “Every success story is a good story, but some people take smaller steps. I’m learning that you’ve got to face certain things before you move on.” Her journey has given her great compassion for people who become homeless: “It’s not a crime to be homeless…things change. Nobody’s protected from becoming homeless.”
Glen still lives in Memphis. Her daughter, now 25, still lives in Minnesota. “I miss her terribly,” Glen says. She does get back to Minnesota when she can, and she says that Tami, her baby sister, can’t believe how much she’s changed. Tami once told her, “Even when you’re not smiling, you’re smiling.” And it’s true.
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