Co-founder Rebecca Younger, left, with Development Coordinator Intern Joan Marcial in the learning center. Photos by Greggory Moore.

Three decades ago, Rebecca Younger opened her home to a pregnant woman in need of shelter, never imagining her gesture of kindness would become a lifelong endeavor.

“It was a snowball effect,” she says from inside New Life Beginnings Inc. (NLB), a Downtown Long Beach sanctuary where pregnant women with children can obtain shelter, food, and training to help her evolve into a better phase of her life. “You have one woman, and then someone calls you and says, ‘I heard you’re housing pregnant women.’ ‘No, I’m not: one woman.’ ‘Well, would you help this gal just to find another place [to live]?’ ‘Well, okay.’ And then I have two women, and then I have three women, and I’m thinking, ‘They can’t stay in my house!'”

She co-founded NLB and was in the process of searching for a three- or four-bedroom house, when a homeless woman helped her out.

“Vera Bell. I’ll never forget her name,” she recalls. “She was homeless and had nine children, and we were both kind of looking for a place to go to. And she said, ‘Rebecca, I found the place for you.'”

That place was a 15-bedroom house at 17th and Lemon. There were problems—the cost outstripped her credit line, and the three-storey edifice had housed a hoarder and was crammed from floors to ceilings with trash—but it seemed the snowball effect extended to destiny.

“Do you believe in miracles? It was one miracle after another,” Younger says. She tells of a man she had never met coming forward with a willingness to co-sign on the property, (“I didn’t even need a down payment!”), of students from St. Anthony High School renting trucks and volunteering to clean out the interior, of a housepainter donating enough paint to redo the entire house. “That’s how it happened: one person telling another person, and people volunteering to help.”

The house may have been a godsend, but one feature made it problematic for completely fulfilling Younger’s vision.

“The stairs were very steep, and [so] we could not take in children,” she says. “And the need for homeless children is so great. [Children are] the new largest number of children. […] The County and different agencies will say, ‘Well, you can bring one child.’ Like one of the ladies that’s here, she has two children. And the other organizations she went to said, ‘You can bring one. Pick—one goes into foster care.’ They usually recommend the oldest goes to foster care so [the mother] can continue bonding with the young one. […] We’re probably one of the only organizations that will take in a large family. We have a gal coming in tomorrow [who] is pregnant, and she has five children.”

Since 1998 NLB has been housed within what formerly was the brothers’ home at St. Anthony Parish and is able to accommodate up to 50 women and their children. There’s a large kitchen and a larder, a family room and a learning center. The bedrooms are a crossbreed of dormitory and motel, furnished and decorated with a warmth that belies the difficult circumstances under which every guest arrives. “It’s important that we’re more homey than institutional,” Younger says.

But life is not easy at NLB, and that is by design. Younger says discipline is key, because part of NLB’s mission to train guests for a better life. Wake-up time is 6:30AM. Tutors are brought in for the children. Television is not allowed inside the bedrooms. Even cell phones are prohibited.

“No contact with the outside [world is allowed], just because it’s such a distraction,” Younger says. “Especially if they’ve had a drug history [and have phones], people are calling them and saying, ‘Hey, I’ll give it to you for free’; or it’s a boyfriend who’s [subjected them] to domestic violence. So they give up their phones so we can keep the house save. […] It’s hard to be here. I make it hard, because what’s ahead of them is hard. Work is hard, and jobs are hard and everything is hard. They have to be strong.”

A NLB endeavor that will make for stronger matriarchs is Project Hope, which will provide an eight-week retail-training course that will include work experience at NLB’s Treasure Hunt Thrift Store, after which Younger and company will help to place course graduates with local businesses. (Look for an article on Project Hope as its launch date approaches.)

NLB’s current project is a clothing drive, as the nonprofit is gearing up to donate bagfuls of “gently used clothing” to 400 women, with 300 bag-of-clothing coupons going to St. Mary Medical Center, which has been providing medical services to the mothers-to-be for the entirety of NLB’s existence.

“They’re amazing to us,” Younger says of St. Mary. “Even if the gal for any reason is not eligible for Medicare, they don’t turn her away. They still service them. They treat them like they’re anyone else paying top dollar.”

Such service—by both St. Mary and by NLB—helps the next generation come into the world with better chances than they would have otherwise. Younger—herself a mother of five—has great affection for the underprivileged little ones she’s helping. A hallway within the shelter is lines with photographs of children who have passed through NLB. She tracks the progress of as many of the children as possible—about 30 percent, she guesses—and can recite the subsequent details of their lives.

Melissa’s mother died last year of cancer, but the infant whose picture hangs there is becoming a fine young woman and is about to graduate high school. Twins Zachary and Harrison were given up for adoption one week after birth but landed in a wonderful home and currently are members of the Air Force Academy. Jonathan is currently attending university on a track scholarship and spoke at the last New Life Beginnings annual banquet.

Those are the successes that drives Younger and the dedicated staff and board members to soldier on in their battle to stop poverty and hopelessness from condemning the lives of mothers and their children, born and unborn.

“I’m always dreaming,” she says. “If I meet one of my ladies who has a problem, [I ask myself,] ‘How do I solve it?'”

The answer at New Life Beginnings is: one problem at a time.

Help New Life Beginnings address the problem of impoverished families’ obtaining new (for them) clothing by donating to the nonprofit’s holiday clothing drive, which ends with the distribution of bags of clothing on December 17 from 10AM to 2PM at the Treasure Hunt Thrift Store (1178 E. Anaheim St., LB 90813). But if you miss that window, donations of clothing—and so much more (food is always the biggest need)—are appreciated year-’round. For more information, call 562.590.1538 or visit newlb.org.