The Sanctuary
2 women team up to turn church into community center
Every week, Ronna Davis-Moore receives letters from Pennsylvania inmates who are about to leave prison and desperate to find a place to stay.
“My people can’t get housing,” said Mrs. Davis-Moore, who left prison in 2001 after serving 4½ years for voluntary manslaughter.
During that time behind bars, the former Hill District woman trained to be an optician. experience shaped her vision for how she could change and also help others cut a new path in life.
Now, as the founder and CEO
of the nonprofit Za’kiyah
House, she runs Donnelle’s Safe Haven for Women in North Braddock, a recently renovated homewhere up to 14 women can live soberly until they find more permanent housing. The house opened in February, and the first woman arrived in March.
“If you have a record, any housing you sign up for, your record is a barrier to gaining housing successfully. That’s why this place is so needed,” Mrs. Davis-Moore said.
On a recent sunny morning, she led a tour of the renovated two-story home with an inviting front porch, a sunny conference room and neatly kept communal living spaces.
For a year, a crew of more than 100 volunteers worked to repair the home, including its original woodwork and oak floors.
The home’s previous owner, Caledonia Curry, is a successful NewYork-based artist known to the art world as Swoon. Ms. Curry, who first visited Braddock in 2010 for an art project, is thrilled with the home’s transformation and glad that she donated it to Mrs. Davis-Moore in 2020.
“She made Donnelle’s. She made a ton of progress in a pretty short amount of time. She’s really no nonsense. She gets things done. She just gets people excited,” Ms. Curry said in a telephone interview.
At Donnelle’s, children can visit their mothers, an advantage that prevents them from entering the foster care system.
The next project in Braddock is an even bigger challenge, but
Mrs. Davis-Moore can already see how important it will be to the community. She recently led a tour of an old church at 725 Jones St. that will become a community center. The former United Brethren in Christ Church will be renamed The Sanctuary. Eventually, it will have three apartments, a place to worship and a social hall on its ground floor.
Two weeks ago, Mrs. DavisMoore received great news: The Pennsylvania Housing Affordability and Rehabilitation Enhancement Fund is providing $300,000 toward the cost of building the three apartments in the former church.
Ms. Curry is supporting that project, too, through The Heliotrope Foundation, a charity she established in 2015. The foundation donated the church, a new roof and the cost of replacing the windows to Za’kiyah House. The artist bought the church with the goal of saving it because many old buildings were being demolished in Braddock.
So far, a Kickstarter campaign overseen by The Heliotrope Foundation has raised more than $79,000, topping a $50,000 goal. That money will be spent on restoring 19 of the building’s 38 windows. The former church already has a new roof, electricity and plumbing.
Restoring big old buildings takes time. In 2010, Ms. Curry began working on the building with Transformazium, a group of local women. Soon after that project started, Ms. Curry said, her mother, father and stepfather died, causing her to lose momentum.
Both of her parents “had been seriously addicted to drugs,” she said. “They had gone to jail, then to rehab and halfway houses.”
Ms. Curry, who grew up in Daytona Beach, Fla., recalls visiting her parents in parking lots outside of halfway houses.
That’s why she has found it especially meaningful to make progress on renovating the former church and seeing Donnelle’s Safe Haven for Women open.
“I know how much it means for these places to exist. I remember visiting my mom in jail,” Ms. Curry said.
Several years ago, the artist found another reason for creating The Sanctuary and housing for inmates who have served their sentences.
While installing her artwork at a Florida art museum, she met a woman who sent her a book detailing her family’s history. She learned that her Curry ancestors came from Scotland and enslaved people in the Bahamas and Florida.
“They enslaved people and for many generations,” the artist said. “Some were my direct ancestors. It was never something that my grandfather talked about.”
Ms. Curry was shocked at first. Then she began to think about ways to make reparations.
“People are noticing some of the imbalances that were set in motion by my ancestors, like access to good health care, access to property and land ownership,” she said.
Her personal beliefs about how to address the impact of slavery have evolved.
“I think reparations is a lifetime of work. If you can come up with ways that feel true to your heart, you are participating in a process of repair,” Ms. Curry said.