The Power of Partnerships: The Drake House’s Shared Mission to Fight Homelessness
In 2025, homelessness continues to be a growing crisis. But Nesha Mason believes that when all of us take a stand, the community will see real change.
As President of The Drake House, Nesha sees firsthand families’ struggles for stability — and ways the community can unite.
“The Drake House was started by a group of community leaders in 2006 after identifying a need for single mothers and their children to overcome homelessness with their dignity and family intact,” Nesha said. “That’s kind of my favorite part of the story because I love it when community leaders take matters into their own hands, pull together their own resources and work to make lives better for their neighbors.”
As the Drake House provides a temporary home and meets families’ physical needs, the staff also walks alongside them, helping them find emotional and mental healing.
“The Drake House helps families overcome not just the circumstance of homelessness but also the trauma of it, particularly for single moms, because [as a mom] you have to be everything to your children in that role. It can be really deflating when you have, for whatever reason, found yourself in a space where you don’t know where you and your kids are going to lie your heads,” Nesha said.
“For us, our programming — as much as it is about housing — is also about helping build [each] mom’s self-esteem back up so that she can be the leader of her family that she wants to be and that her children need her to be.”
The crisis of housing insecurity is nothing new for The Drake House, but this year, the team discovered that the crisis is even more significant than the statistics suggest.
“We use the Point-in-Time (PIT) Count as a gauge for how homelessness is going up in Fulton County,” she shared. “But we realized this year in particular that the Point-in-Time Count is missing a large group of people who are not stably housed and are using extended stay hotels.”
What Nesha and her team found through further research was that about 3,500 evictions occurred every month in Fulton County. In addition, the county had lost over 230,000 affordable units.
“When you’re looking at the loss of affordable housing and looking at evictions, where are those families going?” she asked. “We’re seeing families in extended stay hotels, sleeping in cars or bunking with friends.”
Though The Drake House’s mission has focused on housing and support for single mothers and their children, they felt they could provide additional support to these unhoused families through a vital partnership with The Single Parent Alliance & Resource Center (SPARC) and its Motel-to-Home program.
Together with SPARC, The Drake House team provided guidance, trauma care and emergency services to almost one hundred families, helped some of these families move out of extended stay hotels and into stable housing and connected others with additional resources for next steps.
“I wish that we could have said all one hundred families were relocated to a [stable home], but I know for all of those one hundred families, we were able to provide support to figure out next steps and for quite a few of them, six weeks of housing so they had time and space to determine what’s next,” Nesha explained. “We couldn’t have done that without partnerships.”
In addition to sharing a passion for fighting homelessness, both SPARC and The Drake House are fundholders and partners with the Community Foundation for Northeast Georgia.
“It’s more important than ever that nonprofits are not working in silos, but it’s easier than ever to settle into a silo because the needs in our own sectors are so great,” Nesha shared.
“Anytime you have an organization like the Community Foundation that acts as that connective tissue, it’s an opportunity for us to recognize how we can continue meeting the need in our area and connect with others that we might need to refer [individuals] to or receive referrals from.”
Because of these partnerships, The Drake House team can not only serve their target demographic to the best of their ability but also share hope with others in crisis across the community.
“Partnerships allow us to specialize in what we do. We provide housing supportive services for single mothers and their children, but we certainly encounter people who are experiencing homelessness that don’t necessarily fit that criteria and can be a touchpoint to help them navigate to the resource they need,” she explained.
And this month, yet another partnership shed light on the homelessness crisis and how everyone in the community can step up to help. On October 21, The Drake House hosted a Live Author Discussion in collaboration with local nonprofits and sponsors, including the Community Foundation.
The discussion featured Brian Gladstone, author of There Is No Place for Us, a deep dive into homelessness in America.
“What Brian has done with this book is masterfully lay out the landscape of how we got to the place of lack of housing. It describes, from a historical point of reference, what we’ve done in the city of Atlanta in particular with developments that left a ripple effect for people who lost their housing,” Nesha explained.
“[The book] brings us all to that critical question, ‘At what point did housing become a luxury and not a necessity?’”
Nesha believes this discussion also challenges the community to consider how they view individuals facing a circumstance of homelessness.
“Our community needs to understand that many times we want to make [homelessness] something a person has done wrong, but when there are so many systemic factors that come into play, the deck is stacked against them,” she said.
As Nesha looks forward to a new year, she’s excited to see how partnerships allow The Drake House to continue challenging the community to learn more about the homelessness crisis and to rally community support around families in need.
“There’s not a one-size-fits-all solution that’s going to solve [homelessness], but we can start with the commitment to do something about it.”
Whether life-change occurs within the walls of The Drake House, through another nonprofit’s programming or because one community member stepped up to share hope, Nesha believes everyone can make a difference.
“At the end of the day, the universal language of love and support doesn’t depend on your background,” she said. “It’s about caring for one another and loving your neighbor as yourself.”
The Power of Partnerships: The Drake House’s Shared Mission to Fight Homelessness
In 2025, homelessness continues to be a growing crisis. But Nesha Mason believes that when all of us take a stand, the community will see real change.
As President of The Drake House, Nesha sees firsthand families’ struggles for stability — and ways the community can unite.
“The Drake House was started by a group of community leaders in 2006 after identifying a need for single mothers and their children to overcome homelessness with their dignity and family intact,” Nesha said. “That’s kind of my favorite part of the story because I love it when community leaders take matters into their own hands, pull together their own resources and work to make lives better for their neighbors.”
As the Drake House provides a temporary home and meets families’ physical needs, the staff also walks alongside them, helping them find emotional and mental healing.
“The Drake House helps families overcome not just the circumstance of homelessness but also the trauma of it, particularly for single moms, because [as a mom] you have to be everything to your children in that role. It can be really deflating when you have, for whatever reason, found yourself in a space where you don’t know where you and your kids are going to lie your heads,” Nesha said.
“For us, our programming — as much as it is about housing — is also about helping build [each] mom’s self-esteem back up so that she can be the leader of her family that she wants to be and that her children need her to be.”
The crisis of housing insecurity is nothing new for The Drake House, but this year, the team discovered that the crisis is even more significant than the statistics suggest.
“We use the Point-in-Time (PIT) Count as a gauge for how homelessness is going up in Fulton County,” she shared. “But we realized this year in particular that the Point-in-Time Count is missing a large group of people who are not stably housed and are using extended stay hotels.”
What Nesha and her team found through further research was that about 3,500 evictions occurred every month in Fulton County. In addition, the county had lost over 230,000 affordable units.
“When you’re looking at the loss of affordable housing and looking at evictions, where are those families going?” she asked. “We’re seeing families in extended stay hotels, sleeping in cars or bunking with friends.”
Though The Drake House’s mission has focused on housing and support for single mothers and their children, they felt they could provide additional support to these unhoused families through a vital partnership with The Single Parent Alliance & Resource Center (SPARC) and its Motel-to-Home program.
Together with SPARC, The Drake House team provided guidance, trauma care and emergency services to almost one hundred families, helped some of these families move out of extended stay hotels and into stable housing and connected others with additional resources for next steps.
“I wish that we could have said all one hundred families were relocated to a [stable home], but I know for all of those one hundred families, we were able to provide support to figure out next steps and for quite a few of them, six weeks of housing so they had time and space to determine what’s next,” Nesha explained. “We couldn’t have done that without partnerships.”
In addition to sharing a passion for fighting homelessness, both SPARC and The Drake House are fundholders and partners with the Community Foundation for Northeast Georgia.
“It’s more important than ever that nonprofits are not working in silos, but it’s easier than ever to settle into a silo because the needs in our own sectors are so great,” Nesha shared.
“Anytime you have an organization like the Community Foundation that acts as that connective tissue, it’s an opportunity for us to recognize how we can continue meeting the need in our area and connect with others that we might need to refer [individuals] to or receive referrals from.”
Because of these partnerships, The Drake House team can not only serve their target demographic to the best of their ability but also share hope with others in crisis across the community.
“Partnerships allow us to specialize in what we do. We provide housing supportive services for single mothers and their children, but we certainly encounter people who are experiencing homelessness that don’t necessarily fit that criteria and can be a touchpoint to help them navigate to the resource they need,” she explained.
And this month, yet another partnership shed light on the homelessness crisis and how everyone in the community can step up to help. On October 21, The Drake House hosted a Live Author Discussion in collaboration with local nonprofits and sponsors, including the Community Foundation.
The discussion featured Brian Gladstone, author of There Is No Place for Us, a deep dive into homelessness in America.
“What Brian has done with this book is masterfully lay out the landscape of how we got to the place of lack of housing. It describes, from a historical point of reference, what we’ve done in the city of Atlanta in particular with developments that left a ripple effect for people who lost their housing,” Nesha explained.
“[The book] brings us all to that critical question, ‘At what point did housing become a luxury and not a necessity?’”
Nesha believes this discussion also challenges the community to consider how they view individuals facing a circumstance of homelessness.
“Our community needs to understand that many times we want to make [homelessness] something a person has done wrong, but when there are so many systemic factors that come into play, the deck is stacked against them,” she said.
As Nesha looks forward to a new year, she’s excited to see how partnerships allow The Drake House to continue challenging the community to learn more about the homelessness crisis and to rally community support around families in need.
“There’s not a one-size-fits-all solution that’s going to solve [homelessness], but we can start with the commitment to do something about it.”
Whether life-change occurs within the walls of The Drake House, through another nonprofit’s programming or because one community member stepped up to share hope, Nesha believes everyone can make a difference.
“At the end of the day, the universal language of love and support doesn’t depend on your background,” she said. “It’s about caring for one another and loving your neighbor as yourself.”
