Lily’s Story
On August 14th, 2026, Lily stepped in front of a crowd of donors, volunteers, and staff gathered for Warren Village’s Summer Garden Party. She took the microphone, took a deep breath, and told a room of strangers about her life. It wouldn’t be centered on the professional she’d spent 15 years building in her early career in financial services and corporate finance, but the version that came after.
“Life has a way of reminding you that knowing how to create a plan does not mean you can plan for every painful thing that may happen,” she told the crowd.
Somewhere along the way, Lily had lost herself, she told the crowd. She found herself struggling with addiction, and today she’s in recovery. “I have to say, one of my greatest struggles with being in recovery is the weight of the shame I have felt. To get to the place I am tonight – speaking openly with you about my struggles – took a lot of time and work,” she said.
When she became pregnant with her third daughter, she was already raising two little girls on her own. Lily had no family in Colorado to lean on and soon faced an untenable living situation. “I was terrified,” she says. She wanted somewhere secure for all three of her girls to sleep.
"I thought [getting] housing was the finish line. It was actually the starting line."
“That’s what Warren Village is about”
She got it just in time. Eight months pregnant, Lily was accepted into Warren Village. “The timing was insane,” she says. She secured housing right before giving birth to her third daughter, and discovered another unexpected blessing once she did: she had medical help downstairs, thanks to Warren Village’s onsite Denver Health clinic.
She needed help sooner than expected. Days after an emergency C-section, Lily was still carrying her newborn in a carrier each morning to get her older daughters to the Early Learning Center, and the weight of it was tearing at her incision. For a week, she pushed through the pain alone. Then she worked up the courage to ask a Warren Village staff member, Chandra, if she would hold the baby just during drop-off, to take the pressure off. Chandra said yes. Every single morning, for about a month, Chandra and another staff member, Patrice, held Lily’s newborn. “Chandra and Patrice helped in a time that was needed the most,” Lily says, emotional. “That’s what Warren Village is about.”
That kind of support, she says, changed what she thought Warren Village could give her. “Before coming here, I thought all I needed was housing, that housing was the finish line,” she says. “I was wrong. Housing was the starting line.”
“It is never too late to begin again”
With room to breathe, Lily started asking a bigger question: what kind of life did she want to build for her daughters? She decided to go back to school. Lily will graduate in May 2027 with a bachelor’s degree in Business Management, a milestone she’s chasing in between kids’ snack requests and meltdowns. “Sometimes I am trying to write an assignment while someone is asking for a snack, someone else is crying, and another child has suddenly forgotten how to do something she did perfectly well five minutes earlier,” she says. Still, she notes how important it is to her to see her daughters watching her study. “They are learning that it is never too late to begin again,” she says.
Much of that has been possible, Lily says, because of her Family Advocate, Janesa.
As Lily stood to speak in August, Janesa was watching on a stairway, holding one of Lily’s daughters. Just a few hours before, Janesa helped Lily load three separate car seats into an Uber to the event.
During her speech, Lily gestured to Janesa. Together, she says, they have had long, honest conversations about Lily’s future. “She has celebrated my progress, supported me during difficult moments, and seen me as a whole person,” Lily says, “not simply as a case, a statistic, or a list of circumstances.”
Beyond noting her own progress, Lily wanted to show donors and community members what their investment in Warren Village actually does. “When you invest in one mother, you are not only affecting her life,” she told the crowd. “You are affecting her children, the choices they will make, the opportunities they will recognize, the families they may one day create. You are changing generations.”
Her daughters may not remember every appointment or assignment from this season of their lives, she says. But Lily hopes they’ll remember the version of the story that matters most. “When our family needed a village,” she says, “one was waiting for us.”
