Where Mercy Manor fits: one home against a national need
The pages in this library lay out a crisis measured in the millions. This page is about the much smaller thing we are actually building, and an honest answer to the question that follows naturally: what difference can one small home possibly make against numbers that size?
A single home cannot end a national crisis. It was never going to.
Homelessness, addiction, domestic violence, and incarceration among women are, as the rest of this library shows, national in scale and measured in the millions. Mercy Manor is a home for a small number of women at a time. Held up against those numbers, it will not end any of them, and we are not going to suggest otherwise.
What it can do is something smaller and, we think, still worth doing: take one woman at a time through a full year of stable, supported rebuilding, and return her to a life she chose rather than the one that found her. The case for giving here has never been that a gift solves the problem. It is that a gift does concrete, measurable good for a real person — the kind of good the surrounding system is, at far greater cost, mostly failing to do at all. That honesty is the point of this page, not a caveat on it.
The facts, stated plainly
A one-year residential home
A Christ-centered, non-denominational residential recovery program for adult women (18 and over), located in Granbury, Hood County, Texas.
Small, on purpose
About twelve beds, with room for mothers with children — not a shelter processing large numbers, but a home built for close, personal support over a full year.
How it's funded
The first four months are covered by donations. From month five, once a woman is working again, she contributes $500 a month toward the cost of her own care.
Independently governed
A registered 501(c)(3) public charity (EIN 93-2122542), donor-funded rather than government-funded, targeting an opening date of around November 1. Mercy Manor has not yet opened; see our founder's track record and our board for what stands behind that date.
It is just as important to say what Mercy Manor is not. It does not take women directly from prison — that referral goes to Sanctified Hope, thirty minutes away. It is not an emergency shelter; if tonight is the crisis, other doors are the right ones to call first. And it does not currently accept women in medication-assisted treatment for opioid use — a policy our board is actively reviewing. We would rather a woman, or the agency referring her, know all of this before a phone call or a drive to Granbury than find it out after.
The model, not just the home
Mercy Manor exists to prove something specific: that a full year of Christ-centered, residential, women-only care produces the kind of durable change that shorter or more generic programs struggle to. The evidence for why a year matters is not a claim unique to this house — it is the same reasoning behind gender-responsive, long-term recovery programs wherever they are done well. That evidence is field research on the type of program, not a study of Mercy Manor's own results — we have not yet opened and have no outcomes data of our own yet. Proving it here, in this house, is still ahead of us. See the full case for what works.
That distinction matters for how a gift should be understood. Supporting Mercy Manor is not only supporting one address in Granbury. It is supporting a working example of a program built the right way — one small enough to run well, structured enough to be trusted, and, if it does what it is designed to do, worth someone else replicating in the next county, and the one after that. One home has a ceiling on how many women it can serve. A model that is proven does not.
You cannot close a national gap. You can fund one woman's way through it.
A gift to Mercy Manor does not pretend to fix homelessness, addiction, domestic violence, or incarceration nationally. It funds a real year for a real woman, in a home built to give her that year well. About $6,000 funds her entire year; $500 a month covers her room, food, counseling, and case management.
Explore more of the state of the need: homelessness, addiction, domestic violence, and incarceration & reentry — or see the funding gap donors close and the return a restored life brings.
Where these facts come from
The program facts on this page — capacity, funding structure, admissions policy, legal status, and opening timeline — are Mercy Manor's own, drawn from our program page and our admissions criteria, not from outside research. The scale figures referenced for the national and Texas crisis are sourced separately throughout the state of the need library, with links to the original agency or study on each page.
Last reviewed: July 2026. Program details reflect Mercy Manor's status as of this review and are updated as the home moves toward opening.
Frequently asked questions
How many women can Mercy Manor serve at once?
Mercy Manor is a small home with room for about twelve women at a time, plus space for mothers with children. That is deliberate — the model depends on a full year of close, personal support, which is not possible at large scale in a single house.
Is Mercy Manor government-funded?
No. Mercy Manor is a registered 501(c)(3) public charity (EIN 93-2122542) and is donor-funded, not government-funded. A woman's first four months are covered by donations; from month five, once she is working, she contributes $500 a month toward the cost of her own care.
Does one gift really make a difference against a national problem?
Not against the scale of the problem nationally — one home cannot do that, and we will not claim otherwise. What a gift does is fund a full year of stable, supported recovery for one specific woman, returning her to a life she chose rather than the one that found her. That is a real and measurable outcome, even if the national numbers stay unmoved.
Why does Mercy Manor call itself a model and not just a home?
Because a single home has a ceiling on how many women it can serve, but a proven approach to long-term, Christ-centered residential recovery does not. Mercy Manor exists to prove out that a full year of care works, so the same model can be trusted and repeated elsewhere — not just repeated in this one building. That evidence describes the type of program, not Mercy Manor's own results, which don't exist yet since we have not opened. Proving it here is still ahead of us.