About Us
The National Women's Shelter Network
Together we are stronger!
Our history
The National Women’s Shelter Network began as an initiative of the Lotus House Women’s Shelter and has blossomed since into a growing network of women’s and family shelters and safe haven programs from across the country. In the midst of the pandemic, the leaders of Lotus House longed to connect with other shelter leaders for shared learning and community. To do so, Lotus House had to first build a directory of shelters and it scoured the country to identify each and all of the homeless shelters exclusively serving women and/or mothers and children in communities large and small. Thousands of volunteer hours later, Lotus House built the database of contacts needed to bring this often overlooked and deeply resource-constrained community of shelter providers together for unified action. Then its leadership team took to the road visiting women’s shelters and safe haven programs all across the country, driving close to 30,000 miles in its aim to meet with other shelter leaders and invite them to join a growing network of like minded providers serving women, children and families. By the fall of 2023, the NWSN had grown to over 180 shelters and safe haven programs.
In September of 2023, Lotus House hosted the Inaugural Conference of the NWSN in Miami, Florida. Over 220 leaders from shelters across the country and other experts in the field of homelessness convened in shared learning and community. It was a resounding success and the movement began to establish the NWSN as a membership organization with a vision and mission to advance the status of women, children and families experiencing homelessness and the audacious policy objectives of ending and preventing homelessness in our country.
By the end of 2023, the new National Women’s Shelter Network, Inc. was officially launched as a 501c3 charitable organization. Today, the NWSN Network is 530+ strong and growing!
OUR MISSION
Our Vision
Saving and Changing the Lives of the Most Vulnerable
A world of safety, health, well-being, love, and respect, where everyone will have a safe home and in times of transition, a trauma informed shelter and safe haven with deep protective factors, to assure they can heal, grow, thrive and blossom into who they are meant to be.
Why Women, children and families
The NWSN focuses its efforts on supporting women’s and family homeless shelters and safe haven programs because they stand at the intersection of violence and homelessness, doors wide open to the street, struggling to keep the lights on and put food on the table. Deluged by a seemingly endless stream of women, youth and children in need, women’s and family shelters and safe haven programs serve the most vulnerable in our country. Sadly, women’s and family homeless shelters and havens too often lack the resources traditionally flowing to domestic violence shelters under the Federal Violence Against Women’s Act or other Federal funds aimed at housing first and rapid rehousing programs. In the absence of meaningful Federal funding for a growing epidemic of homelessness, the shelters and safe haven programs serving the most vulnerable women, children and families in our country have been forced to piece together a patchwork quilt of disparate, threadbare funding for many decades. The NWSN aims to change this narrative, to bring together the voices of the “last, the lost, the least and forgotten” and those who serve them, to inform, uplift and demand the change so richly deserved by women, children and families in need in what is arguably the most powerful country in the world.
How We Help
Saving and Changing Lives of the Most Vulnerable
The National Women’s Shelter Network is focused on saving and changing the lives of the women, children and families experiencing homelessness in our country and the women’s and family shelters and safe haven programs that serve them. NWSN programs provide a wide range of support to our members and in turn the women, children and families they serve through resources, information sharing, education, training, advancing standards of care, and advocacy.