By Donald Gilpin

Connie Mercer

HomeFront founder Connie Mercer has announced that she will be stepping down as CEO. On September 30, and she’ll be moving on to other roles, including homelessness advocacy on the state and national level.

“I founded HomeFront in 1991 with a simple, but ultimately complex mission: to end family homelessness in Mercer County,” she wrote in a March 23 note to HomeFront friends and supporters. “We started without any financial resources and a few dedicated volunteers.”

She described how for her HomeFornt became “an all-consuming family effort” and “a true labor of love.”

Based in Lawrenceville with its family campus in Ewing, HomeFront currently provides shelter and support to more than 500 people every night and last year responded to 52,439 requests for shelter, homelessness prevention, permanent service-enriched housing, job training, children’s programming, food, and other essentials.

“Throughout the last 31 years,” she wrote, “my role has changed countless times to meet the shifting demands of the organization. And now it changes again. My goal has been to ensure that HomeFront would thrive beyond me. And now I’m confident that goal has been reached.”

Under Mercer’s leadership HomeFront has become a national model for how to effectively break the cycle of family poverty and a leader in the social service field. She was honored at the White House during President Obama’s administration, was inducted into the New Jersey Hall of Fame for Housing and Economic Development in 2019, and received an honorary degree from Princeton University in 2021.

In a March 29 telephone interview Mercer reflected on some of her accomplishments at HomeFront that she is most proud of. “We’ve successfully rallied the community to make a difference and to care and to continue to care about the issue of homeless families in a realistic, hands-on way,” she said. “Mercer County, unlike any other county in the state, has really made a commitment to homeless families. I’m very proud of that.”

She continued, “I’m also proud of having built an effective comprehensive model, with 26 integrated programs that help folks move from homelessness to self-sufficiency. I’m afraid too many folks think of HomeFront as only dealing with homelessness. That we do very well, but that’s the easy part. The hard part is moving folks on to self-sufficiency.”

Mercer emphasized that this is the right time for her to step down. “For decades HomeFront has felt like my child, and today I feel like a proud parent whose child has grown up into a capable, mature adult, ready to meet the future. Leading HomeFront through a pandemic during the last two years gave me the opportunity to observe the agency’s strength and resilience.”

She continued, “HomeFront’s board of directors and experienced and dedicated staff are ready. We have a strong and vibrant infrastructure which will allow me to concentrate on the growing problem of homelessness throughout New Jersey and nationally.”  Mercer and the board are working together to ensure a smooth transition and have engaged a national search firm to identify Mercer’s successor.

Mercer noted that the biggest challenge ahead for HomeFront is the lack of affordable housing in the local community, in the state, and in the whole country.  “Since the beginning of the Reagan era, through both Democratic and Republican administrations, the public commitment to affordable housing has decreased by 90 percent,” she said. “That commitment has gone away. Lack of affordable housing is the key issue, the biggest challenge ahead.”

After September Mercer will be continuing her work in leading the New Jersey Shelter Providers Consortium, sharing her experience with more than 200 shelters across the state; supporting the HomeFront leadership team by identifying strategic partnerships and collaborations; and writing a book about the HomeFront model to help other agencies.

She commented on the broadening of her focus. “For this next chapter, one of my key priorities is the Shelter Providers Consortium of New Jersey,” she said. “This association of homeless shelters and advocacy groups has enormous potential to improve the futures of hundreds of thousands of people, and I am deeply excited to be a part of that.”

HomeFront’s Board of Trustees Chair Ruth Scott expressed her appreciation to Mercer and announced the establishment of a Connie Mercer Fund at HomeFront in her honor. “Connie’s extraordinary vision and unflagging dedication has transformed the lives of thousands of homeless families,” said Scott. “She has built HomeFront, in strong partnership with the community, to provide the breadth of services needed to help families break the cycle of poverty.”

Tributes have arrived from many different quarters. “Connie was the first person to say that I could make it, that I was beautiful, that I was special,” said a former HomeFront client. “I was 48 years old and felt like a failure because I lost my job and we were two weeks from being evicted. That was six years ago.”  That former client and her family are thriving today, HomeFront reports. “She is happily employed, her children are college educated, and she still regularly paints and sews with HomeFront’s ArtSpace.”

Mercer recalled a memory from the early days of HomeFront. “One of the first families that we dealt with was living in a motel that had been converted into an alcohol detox center, but three rooms had been set aside for homeless families,” she said. “This was not a family of alcoholics. There were three boys, a mom who worked as a nurse’s aide every day, and a dad who literally crawled to the door to answer the door the first time I met him. He had no wheelchair because they didn’t know how to work the system.”

She went on, “The boys were lovely, but they couldn’t go outside because outside was filled with folks who were detoxing. We worked hard and in quick order got the dad a wheelchair, got his wife a job that paid better, and found them a little house in Ewing. We put out the word to friends and got the place furnished.

“My memory is so clear of my husband and I on the day before Christmas bringing them a Christmas tree and the complete and absolute joy of the children when we brought in the tree and lights. One of the boys eventually became the class valedictorian at Ewing High School. All three now have good jobs. Dad’s dream had always been to be a chef, and two of the boys are working now as chefs at quality restaurants and the other is a manager at Lowe’s. It’s a lovely memory.”

When asked if there were any parting words she wanted to leave with the community, she chose to quote the anthropologist Margaret Mead: “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.”

Mercer added, “That’s what our community has done. I’m very proud to have channeled the energies of this community.”