We want our own yard to play in!

Hi, my name is Sara Kirkland. I'm a wife and mother to 3 fur babies. I am raising funds for my family and my mother in law to have a place of our own. We have been homeless for over 7 years and we are seeking any help to be able to find a stable place to call home and raise our fur babies and take care of my wife's disabled mother. Your Venetia donations will be used to apply for apartments,  secure the deposit and first month's rent,  set up utilities and furnish our new place.  This would give us a solid foundation to be able to continue to move forward.  

Our story starts in Sacramento, CA. We were living in a duplex in North Highlands taking care of my wifes mother and under the thumb of a terrible landlord who never fixed a thing in our home. Both bathrooms became unusable, the starter heater did not work,  and the place was infested with pests.  Due to his negligence, when a county worker was anonymously alerted to our living situation, an inspector came and deemed our home uninhabitable and condemned the property, giving us only 3 days to vacate the property before boarding the entire place up and nailing it shut. Needless to say, this obviously did not give a family enough time to find a new place or gather the funds needed in order to secure a new place to live. We could only take what we could carry our what we could cream into a storage unit.  All of our furniture and many other keepsakes were lost. 

Our family was terrified and homeless. We lived on the front lawn of our condemned duplex for 2 weeks before the sheriff's department made us walk away. That's the last time we had a place to call home.

For the next 5 years we lived in a tent beside the railroad tracks on Roseville Rd. It was dirty and dangerous and loud. We moved up and down the tracks, constantly harassed by the sheriff's department to move somewhere else. At night we were terrified to close our eyes and when we did fall asleep, it was only to be awoken by the roar of passing trains and ground rumbling or some random person coming to our camp for some unsavory reason. I will forever be changed by this time in my life and I'm not sure what I will be like when it's finally over. I know that I have a different view of the homeless and just how complicated and out of control the problem is.

My wife and I searched tirelessly for a solution to put us on a path that would get us into a home where we could all thrive and her mother, who is disabled, into a safe and healthy environment. We have been unsuccessful. Camping in a tent does not give you adequate access to water and the ability to maintain hygiene. This makes it nearly impossible to apply for jobs. Every day tasks that some take for granted became impossible for us. We hauled in our own clean water, but just enough to water the animals and drink. We spent hot days under the shade of trees, unable to do nothing else, because of the heat. We have spent cold stormy nights holding our tent up from the inside with our hands, praying that the water would not make its way to our blankets-- making it impossible to stay warm. We have lived in conditions that I would wish on no other person. I have lost friends that only died because they were living outside. A woman I know was recently killed by a drunk driver while asleep in her tent.

By the grace of the powers that be, two years ago I managed to secure a job delivering groceries for Instacart. For the past two years my wife and I have worked 7 days a week, 10+ hours a day, just to stay inside. We work everyday to pay for every day. We make just enough money to rent a car (to work) and to rent a seedy hotel room to sleep in. We pay for the car and the room each and everyday. We live with the constant threat of being forced back outside and into a tent. hat fate would end my ability to work. But working this way cripples my ability to save any money, rent an apartment, or do anything else to move us forward.

After 7 years of being homeless, and two years of trying, unsuccessfully, to work hard and pull ourselves up and out of this mess, I've decided it's time to ask my community for help. I've applied for low income housing and we have been on that list for two years. 

The picture above is of Meeka (she's the husky) and Daisy. They are both rescues, Daisy from an abusive home where she was forced to live on the top bunk of a bunk bed-- never allowed to get down. She was fed and she was made to go to the bathroom, all up there on that top bunk. We had to take her out of there. Meeka we found abandoned at the hotel where we are staying. We found her in the last really big storm we had in the beginning of March. She was shivering and wet and howling and whining at an empty hotel room door all night. Someone abandoned her here. So she was adopted as one of our family too. Not pictured is our kitty named Bubba. A mean person broke one of his rear legs on purpose. He was only 8 weeks old at the time. Of course, we promptly removed him from that environment and splinted his leg. He healed fabulously and is now a little terror. :) I'm telling you this because, they too, deserve some sanctuary out of the elements.  

Thank you so much for reading this far. I appreciate the ability to tell our story and the hope that it gives us.

Have a beautiful day!