How We're Helping By Grace Women's Transitional Home Build a Path Forward

At CommunityAid, we believe that every neighbor deserves a chance to rebuild. That conviction is woven into everything we do, from the thrift stores where our community shops and donates, to the hundreds of local nonprofits we partner with across central Pennsylvania. One of those partners holds a very special place in our hearts: By Grace Women's Transitional Home in Middleburg, Pennsylvania.

Their work is quiet, unglamorous, and absolutely essential. And we are proud to stand beside them every step of the way.

Who is “By Grace Women's Transitional Home”

Nestled in Snyder County, By Grace Women's Transitional Home was born from the vision and determination of community members Tammy Clinger and Catherine Flather, two women who saw a desperate gap in services for homeless women in and around Middleburg and decided to do something about it. With the support of Grace Covenant Community Church and a chorus of community volunteers and donors, they opened their doors and began offering something that is often harder to find than a roof: genuine compassion, structure, and hope.

The 12-bed transitional home serves women, and women with children who are in need of temporary, transitional housing. Many residents arrive having fled dangerous situations, walked out of incarceration, or finally taken a first courageous step away from addiction. What they find at By Grace is a safe space that meets them exactly where they are and helps move them toward where they deserve to be. The home promotes accountability, honesty, and, ultimately, independence, walking alongside each woman as she works to secure stable housing, employment, and a renewed sense of self-worth.

Stories like that of Nicole Edison, a resident who moved in following her release from jail and quickly discovered that the love and support at By Grace was unlike anything she had encountered before, remind us why this work matters so much. As she put it: "You have to be open to the love and want to get your life together." That openness is exactly what By Grace nurtures, and it is exactly the kind of transformation we at CommunityAid exist to fuel.

Why We Partner with By Grace

Our mission at CommunityAid is anchored in three focus areas: housing, food, and basic human needs. By Grace Women's Transitional Home sits squarely at the intersection of all three. When a woman walks through their doors, she isn't just receiving a bed for the night. She is receiving a comprehensive lifeline, emergency shelter, pathways to employment, connections to community resources, and the kind of mentorship and accountability that changes lives.

We are a faith-based organization guided by Christ-like behaviors and the fruit of the Spirit. By Grace shares that same foundation. Their ministry is rooted in the belief that every woman, regardless of how she arrived at their door, is worthy of dignity, investment, and a true second chance. That shared faith commitment makes this partnership feel less like a transaction and more like family working together toward the same goal.

Unlike nationally recognized thrift chains, we invest our time, resources, and a portion of our profit directly into local organizations making a large impact in the lives of neighbors in our own backyard. By Grace Women's Transitional Home is precisely the kind of neighbor-first ministry we were built to support.

How We Support By Grace Women's Transitional Home

Our support for By Grace flows through several channels, each designed not just to provide resources, but to build the organizational capacity they need to keep doing their vital work.

Every time a shopper walks into one of our seven Pennsylvania thrift stores and makes a purchase, they are participating in something much larger than a transaction. A portion of those sales flows directly back into our communities through the CommunityAid Foundation. By Grace Women's Transitional Home is among our recognized nonprofit partners, receiving financial support through our Foundation's grant programs. This funding helps cover the operational costs that keep the lights on, the beds made, and the programs running, the necessary expenses that are often the hardest for small nonprofits to fund.

One of the most immediate and tangible ways we help is through our Care Card program. We distribute Care Cards to nonprofit partners like By Grace, which their clients can use to shop at our stores for clothing and essential items at no cost. For a woman who has arrived with nothing, sometimes literally only the clothes on her back being able to walk into a CommunityAid store and pick out a warm coat, a pair of shoes for a job interview, or clothes for her children is more than practical. It is an act of restoring dignity. We provided $247,500 in Care Cards across our partner network in 2024, and every one of those dollars represents a real neighbor being clothed and cared for.

Beyond Care Cards, we also provide product distributions and bin support to partners serving our community. Gently used clothing, household items, and other goods donated to CommunityAid can make their way directly into the hands of By Grace residents furnishing rooms, stocking closets, and filling the practical gaps that transitional living inevitably creates.

We also recognize that small nonprofits like By Grace often struggle not just with funding, but with visibility. By naming By Grace Women's Transitional Home among our Foundation partners, we amplify their presence in the community, helping connect them with donors, volunteers, and supporters who might not have known they existed. Our platform built on the trust and generosity of hundreds of thousands of central Pennsylvania shoppers and donors, becomes their platform too.

Our Giving Model: Generosity That Compounds

What makes our support for By Grace and all of our nonprofit partners, sustainable is the unique giving model that powers everything we do. Our thrift stores generate the reliable revenue that funds our programs, keeping overhead covered and allowing us to direct as much impact as possible back into the community. Since our founding, this model has channeled over $26 million to local charities.

In 2024 alone, we distributed $657,856 in bin distributions, $247,500 in Care Cards, and $762,176 in grants to nonprofit partners serving our local community. Behind every one of those dollars is a shopper who chose to browse a rack of second-hand sweaters instead of heading to a big-box retailer, a donor who dropped off a bag of clothes instead of sending them to a landfill, and a neighbor who said "yes" when asked to round up their total at the register.

That is the beauty of what we have built together — generosity that compounds. Your donation becomes a neighbor's Care Card. Your purchase becomes a grant that keeps By Grace's doors open. Your spare change at the register becomes a bed for a woman who has nowhere else to go.

The Impact We See Together

When we look at what By Grace Women's Transitional Home accomplishes, women moving from crisis to stability, from dependence to employment, from homelessness to homes of their own, we see the direct downstream effect of our community's generosity. We see it in residents like Rachel Loden, who spent 13 months at By Grace getting back on her feet and left with not just new stability, but lasting friendships and a foundation for a genuinely different life.

That is what we mean when we talk about lasting impact. Not a one-time handout, but a sustained investment in a neighbor's capacity to thrive. By Grace does the incredibly hard daily work of walking alongside women through some of the most vulnerable moments of their lives. We do the work of making sure By Grace has the resources to keep showing up.

How You Can Help

Our ability to support By Grace Women's Transitional Home and the more than 500 other nonprofit partners we serve across central Pennsylvania, depends entirely on the generosity of this community, and there are so many ways to get involved.

Shopping at any of our seven Pennsylvania thrift stores is one of the simplest and most powerful things you can do. Every purchase you make directly funds our mission and the partners we support. You get quality items at fair prices, and your neighbor gets a lifeline. If you have gently used clothing, shoes, or household goods sitting around, drop them at a CommunityAid Donation Center. Donated items do double duty fueling our revenue model and directly clothing neighbors in need through our Care Card program.

Next time you're checking out at one of our stores, consider rounding up your total. Our RoundUp program lets you add just a few cents to your purchase to build even more funding for our Foundation partners. It sounds small, but multiplied across thousands of transactions, the impact is enormous.

And if you want to do something that costs nothing at all, tell someone about By Grace Women's Transitional Home and about CommunityAid. Tell your friends, your coworkers, your church community. Awareness is its own form of generosity, and it is how neighbors find the help they need.

We are deeply grateful for the dedicated team at By Grace Women's Transitional Home for Tammy, Catherine, Stephanie, and every volunteer and staff member who has ever sat with a woman in crisis and said, "You belong here, and we are not giving up on you." That kind of love is what changes communities. We are just honored to help make sure it keeps going.

Together, one neighbor at a time.