Christian recovery for women in Granbury, TX and Hood County — and real help if you need shelter tonight

What Mercy Manor is — and isn't

Search for "women's shelter Hood County" or "Christian recovery Granbury TX" and you'll find a mix of things that aren't quite the same. An emergency shelter exists to get a woman safe tonight, for days or weeks, often during an acute crisis. Mercy Manor is different: a one-year, Christ-centered residential recovery program for a woman who has already reached safety and is ready to rebuild — from addiction, from an abusive relationship she's left, or from homelessness that followed either. If tonight is the emergency, Mission Granbury's Ada Carey Shelter for Women and Children and the resources above are the right first call. If she's past the emergency and needs a structured place to become someone new, that's what Mercy Manor is for.

A program with real Hood County roots

Mercy Manor isn't a national chain opening a franchise location in Granbury. Its founder and board live in Hood County and, in several cases, have already spent years doing this exact work here. Mary Flores has served as Crime Victim Liaison for the Hood County Sheriff's Office for a decade. Adam Arrington serves as a Reserve Deputy with the same department. Karen Kalinka attends Acton Baptist Church, just outside Granbury, and brings seven years of hands-on program-building experience from an inner-city women's shelter in Edmonton, Alberta. Founder Sharon King has led a transitional home for women before, and made Granbury home in 2021. A local ministry with local relationships tends to know things a national program from out of state doesn't: who else to call, what actually exists here, and what a woman in this specific county is up against.

Other Christian recovery options serving this region

Mercy Manor isn't the only faith-based recovery option in the broader Dallas-Fort Worth area, and it's worth saying so plainly. Stonegate Center, on 125+ acres outside the Metroplex, runs a well-regarded Christian 12-step program for men and women. Adult & Teen Challenge Texas operates low-cost, Christ-centered residential programs across the state. Both are established, legitimate options, and if one is a better fit for someone's specific situation, referring her there is the right call.

Mercy Manor's place in that landscape is narrower and more specific: a program built from the ground up for women whose story combines homelessness, abuse, and addiction together — not a general-population program that happens to accept women, but one designed around the particular way those three struggles compound for the women it will serve, run by a board that has spent careers in exactly that intersection.

Serving Granbury, Hood County, and North Texas

Exactly who we can and cannot take →

Hood County is home base, not a residency requirement. Mercy Manor is built to welcome women from Granbury, from the surrounding North Texas communities, from across the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex, and from anywhere in Texas who are ready for a structured, one-year, Christ-centered program. Get Help walks through exactly how to start that conversation, whether that's a woman reaching out for herself or a family member, church, or agency reaching out on her behalf.

That reach is practical, not aspirational. From Granbury, Mercy Manor sits within about an hour of most of the region it serves: Parker County (Weatherford), Johnson County (Cleburne and Burleson), Somervell County (Glen Rose), Erath County (Stephenville), Palo Pinto County, and Tarrant County — Fort Worth and its suburbs — to the northeast. For a family anywhere in that stretch of North Texas looking for a Christ-centered residential program for a wife, daughter, or sister, Granbury is close enough to visit and far enough to be a genuinely new start.

And the need here is not an import from the big city. Board member Karen Kalinka, who built a women's recovery program at Edmonton's Hope Mission before moving to Granbury, describes what she found here:

"Granbury's homelessness is invisible. In a wealthy community, it does not look like shopping carts or street corners. It looks like a woman sleeping in her car. A woman couch-surfing from house to house. A woman in a tent by the river. A woman staying in a dangerous relationship because she has no other option." — Karen Kalinka, Mercy Manor board member

These women, she says, deserve more than survival — safety, structure, healing, and a Christ-centered home where they can rebuild their lives with dignity. That conviction is why the board built Mercy Manor here rather than in the Metroplex, and why the program is open to the whole region. For more on why homelessness among women so rarely looks like the stereotype, see understanding homelessness among women.

Common questions