If you’re following the Shoebox Stories, this is number three in the series. The photo that evoked these memories is of Dottie Wobb, our founding Executive Director, taking a phone call from our first client, before the buildout of that first little center in Davie was even completed!
God showed us clearly that there was a need as the news about a place to help women quickly spread throughout the county. In 1990, Broward County reported over 8,000 abortions – and that number would grow rapidly over the next decade.
The volunteers who put up the drywall had just finished and the phones were connected late on a Friday afternoon in early June. We had just received our letter from the IRS, giving us the formal notification that our 501(c)(3) status was approved, and we were so excited!
Dottie and I stopped by to see how the space looked with the walls completed. In those days, I usually had a disposable 35mm camera in my purse so we could document the beginnings of the crisis pregnancy center ministry in south Broward.
The phone rang and we both jumped. Dottie picked it up, and a young woman hesitantly asked, “Is this the place that gives free pregnancy tests?” Dottie assured her that she had called the right place and told her she could come in the following week if she didn’t mind concrete floors and a little construction dust. Everything was falling into place, and even though we didn’t know it at the time, history was being made.
The need was great from the very beginning, and we have grown from that first year when we saw a hundred women at that one location to a county-wide ministry where we anticipate seeing almost 7,000 women this year! The concrete floors you see in the picture were Holy Ground, and we are still building on that firm foundation at Hope Women’s Centers!
“God did this so that they would seek him and perhaps reach out for him and find him; he is not far from any one of us.” ~ Acts 17:27
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