When Marnie Delacruz goes to work, she always looks forward to doing everything she can to help her clients feel seen, supported and celebrated for all their achievements, however big or small.
Those special clients are unhoused individuals and families from across the San Fernando and Santa Clarita valleys, who receive a wide range of services from Hope the Mission, a growing nonprofit organization based in North Hills, where Delacruz has worked for nearly five years.
Delacruz is director of access and engagement, overseeing outreach teams and the navigation center in North Hollywood, which offers services such as showers, restrooms, storage bins, a job center on site and assistance with interim housing.
“One of the things that I love is interacting with our participants,” said Delacruz. “It brings me so much joy to be able to look at somebody and lock eyes with them and have a conversation – not just, ‘What do you need? What are you here for?’ That’s not what we do. We have conversations with them – we know their names. You wouldn’t believe how much of an impact that has.
“Here at Hope, we do this work because we want everyone we encounter to be reminded that they have somebody walking alongside them,” she said. “They have somebody who’s going to celebrate with them when they tell us, ‘I got a referral into the shelter’ … [or] ‘I got my ID.’”
For Delacruz, her work is deeply meaningful because she gets to support people facing the seemingly insurmountable challenges of being unhoused – an experience she knows all too well.
Delacruz first experienced homelessness as a teen, when she was forced to live on her own.
“By 16, I left home and I was just trying to figure out everything that I could,” she said. “I was sleeping on friends’ couches and sometimes [on] porches because they couldn’t sneak me in.”
What began as a period of instability and occasional homelessness as she was trying to find her footing while adapting to living on her own, later gave way to a much darker stage in her life, she recounted. Delacruz got married at 18, but soon found herself alone again after her husband ended up in prison. She eventually started abusing drugs and her life spiraled out of control.
While her husband was in prison, Delacruz slipped into an eight‑year period of addiction and homelessness – sleeping on sidewalks, behind bushes, in cars or abandoned RVs with no electricity or water – and was using drugs as a way to stay awake and survive on the streets.
“I went through homelessness for eight years and, as a woman experiencing homelessness, it’s very difficult. It deteriorates you in every single way, not just physically,” she said. “It breaks you down, even for the strongest of the strong. You don’t know [when or] where you’re going to eat, [and] your head is constantly on a swivel [because] you don’t know where you can be safe.
“When I first started getting high, it was to get high,” she added. “After that, it was more of a means of survival … to [stay] alert, and also to numb the feelings that I was going through. … There’s never a moment when you feel at peace or safe. There’s never a good night’s sleep.”
Delacruz said she finally decided to “quit [drugs] cold turkey” and fully embrace sobriety when her husband was released from prison, noting that she found much-needed strength in her faith.
“When he came home from prison, I decided that was it and God made sure that that was it,” she said. Her determination remained steadfast – after that, she never got high again, said Delacruz.
Tragically, her recovery has been touched by profound loss. In 2017, she lost her husband to a drug overdose after what she described as a frustrating search for limited treatment resources.
“I tried to get my husband help many, many, many times, but … trying to obtain help was challenging,” said Delacruz. “It was a struggle and, ultimately, it resulted in us losing him.”
That’s one of the reasons she feels thankful to work for an organization like Hope the Mission, which offers substance abuse treatment options and will soon be expanding its services.
“We have 11 new projects coming,” said Delacruz. “The importance of having [more] open doors to our programs [is because that] means there’s an open door for a young Marnie out there, and there’s an open door for [someone like] my husband, who couldn’t get the help he needed.”
As someone who is now waiting on the other side of that door to assist others, Delacruz said she strives to treat every person she meets as a “human being,” rather than taking an assembly-line approach to providing services. Her goal is to assure them that they are deserving of kindness, dignity and respect, despite how they may be perceived and treated by others in society.
“It feels like everything that I’ve been through in life has been for this, like this is the purpose in my pain and I am so grateful for it,” stressed Delacruz. “I love that we are the voice for people who are experiencing homelessness, and we do our best to help them … find their own voice.”