Lillian’s Success Story
From sleeping in a car through a winter with her teenage daughter, Lillian rebuilt everything, her job, her home, and her family, one step at a time.
In October 2023, Lillian and her teenage daughter moved into a car. Hours had been cut at Lillian’s grocery job, dropping her from something close to full-time to just two days a week, four hours a day, and the rent money simply wasn’t there anymore. An eviction followed, and with nowhere else to go, a non-running car became home.
“Half the time I couldn’t keep the car running all night to keep the heat on,” Lillian recalls. “I was worried about gas. Where am I gonna go to the bathroom? How much money do I need for my daughter? Your mind is just always going.” On the hardest nights, she was getting one or two hours of sleep.
When her daughter’s school learned the family was living in their vehicle, she was placed in foster care. For Lillian, that loss became the defining motivator of the months ahead.
“It’s always been me and her. Her not being by my side, something wasn’t right. I had to get on the ball and get it together.”
A referral from a juvenile justice caseworker named Ms. Houser connected Lillian to Goodwill’s Career Center in 2024, where she met Justine, her career navigator. Every week, Justine provided updated job leads. Lillian would stop by the office regularly, submit applications, and take Justine’s check-in calls. The relationship was consistent, practical, and built on trust.
“She would know who was hiring and let me know. I would put my application in. And she’d check in on me, call me in periodically, and see how I was doing,” Lillian says.
At the same time, Justine connected Lillian with HELD, a housing support program partnered with Goodwill. Lillian was skeptical at first. “People don’t give out money like that,” she thought. But within 48 hours of her initial meeting, she had a list of housing options and an approved apartment.
Lillian found work at a local retailer, stayed connected with Justine, and kept meeting the milestones required to support her case for reunification with her daughter. She was taking the bus or using her sister’s car to get to and from work.
After more than a year of struggling with reliable transportation, Justine pointed her to Wheels for Hope, a program that provides cars to qualifying individuals. Lillian applied and waited. On August 8 2025, a date she remembers exactly she received a car.
Her daughter came home that same month, after nearly a year in foster care. The stable housing Lillian had worked so hard to secure made the reunion possible.
“I gotta do better for me and my daughter,” Lillian says. “So I made the changes I needed to make, find a better job, get housing, and just kept pushing myself.”
Today, Lillian works full-time in food service at Cone Health, with benefits. She’s in the same apartment she moved into when HELD helped her, and she and her daughter are together again. Her daughter is thriving in an online school program that suits her better than a traditional setting.
“I don’t have to worry about what bill I’m gonna pay this week and what I’m gonna put off till next week,” Lillian says. “I can pay this and pay that in the same week and still have money left over.” She’s begun building savings, something that would have been unthinkable not long ago.
When she worked as a cashier at Triad Goodwill’s N. Elm Street, she had a line she used every time she asked customers to round up their change: “Would you like to round up your change today to help people like me find a job?” She said it because she meant it.
Lillian is still connected with Justine. She still lives in the same apartment. And she has a new horizon in sight, maybe management someday, she says, though she’s not in a rush to plan every detail. Right now, she’s letting herself breathe.
“I want to go to the beach one weekend,” she told us. “I’m free every other weekend now.”
Her daughter summed it up best. “Mommy, you came a long way,” she told her mother recently.
Lillian’s answer: “So have you. We both came a long way.”
