For most children, the hours after school are filled with homework, snacks, sports, art projects, and time with friends. For children living in family shelters, those ordinary parts of childhood can be much harder to access.

Home for Arts, Voices, Enrichment, and Nurturing (HAVEN) is a Philadelphia 501(c)(3) nonprofit providing free, structured, arts-based after-school enrichment directly inside Jane Addams Place, a family shelter in North Philadelphia. Through literacy and storytelling, arts creation, and licensed movement-based therapy, HAVEN is reimagining the shelter as a site for childhood, creativity, and growth — so that housing instability does not have to mean losing access to consistency, enrichment, or joy.

We built HAVEN around what families told us they needed. At Jane Addams Place, 100% of caregivers surveyed wanted greater academic support for their children, 88% wanted more supervised physical activity and positive engagement, and 88% said after-school programming would give them time to pursue work, appointments, or training.

In response, we bring structured enrichment directly into the shelter, where families already live. Across the year, we serve approximately 30 children in grades K–8, removing cost and transportation as barriers to participation.

Because HAVEN is embedded in the shelter, its impact extends beyond the children in our classrooms. We hire high-school shelter residents as paid near-peer mentors — often in their first jobs — where they build leadership, workplace, financial, and career skills while becoming familiar role models for younger children. At the same time, caregivers gain dependable hours to work toward their own goals and stable housing.

What makes HAVEN awesome to us is that no one member of the family is supported in isolation. By supporting a child, an adolescent, and their caregiver(s) — together — HAVEN strives to nurture the success of the whole family.