The Independent‘s recent front-page piece on trafficking in Santa Barbara stayed with me, because the biggest risk factor isn’t usually the one person picture. It’s vulnerability that can look like poverty, isolation, no one checking in, and unstable housing. That’s the door traffickers walk through. It’s also the door a lot of pregnant and postpartum mothers in this county are standing in, alone, right now, and their vulnerable children are standing there with them.
Villa Majella is the only maternity home in Santa Barbara County built specifically for pregnant and new mothers and their babies. About half of the mothers we serve have experienced domestic violence, a horrible reality that puts them and their children at elevated risk for trafficking and exploitation. As a nonprofit 501(c)(3), we don’t take state or federal funding nor do we discriminate based on immigration status. We are a small group of women, many of us mothers ourselves, holding this grassroots organization together one phone call, one doctor’s appointment, one diaper run at a time, by giving mothers holistic support and a real path to stable, safe housing.
A mother came to us once nine months pregnant, with no shoes on her feet. Barefoot at our front door. Most of the mothers who find us don’t need something extraordinary. They need someone standing between them and despair, someone or something that can offer real hope. We offer more than hope. We offer tangible care, specialized programs of support, resources that moms and children actually need, and the dignity of a home: a clean bed, a hot shower, and peace. We are often the ones holding their hands through labor and early postpartum, helping them settle in, and making sure they have had a proper meal and are getting the medical care they need.
We are very small team advocating for many women who have felt that they have had no voice. Helping one mom and baby get stable and secure sets off a ripple effect. For many women, ours is the first clean and peaceful home they’ve ever experienced. That in itself gives a mother dignity and a calmed nervous system to get out of survival mode so that she can develop the self-agency to proactively work toward a better life for herself and her child.
Many of these women just need assistance to get back on their feet. They are incredibly strong and resilient already, but pregnancy, postpartum recovery, and caring for a newborn alone is an enormous undertaking. Let alone, dealing with past traumas they carry. It is exhausting, labor-intensive work that our society doesn’t support at risk mothers and babies enough for. That’s where Villa Majella stands. We become their safety net, to catch mom and baby and keep them safe and secure.
Santa Barbara has spent real attention this year on the forces that put our children at risk from trafficking, exploitation, the quiet ways vulnerable kids fall through the cracks. I’d ask this community to look one step further upstream. Before a child is at risk, there is almost always a mother who was at risk first: unsupported, unhoused, unseen. Catching her early is one of the most direct ways to change what happens to her child.
That national conversation has grown louder this year, as a heartbreaking case in Massachusetts has pushed maternal mental health into the spotlight and mothers everywhere have started speaking up for one another, naming what so many have felt alone: that the systems meant to catch a struggling mother often aren’t there when she needs them most. Santa Barbara is not exempt from that gap. A mother doesn’t have to be in crisis to be unsupported, and she doesn’t have to be diagnosed with something to be drowning. Villa Majella started 40 years ago from a support call line, and then quickly grew into the need for safe housing for mothers in crisis.
Villa Majella has done this work steadily and humbly for many years, quietly holding the door open every day. The care of women and their children has always been, and will always be, at the heart of what we do. We believe in protecting the vulnerable mothers and babies in our community with dignity, care, and action. We are asking this community to see what has been happening all along in its midst, and to help us keep that door open for the next mother who has nowhere else to go.
If you know a mother in crisis, or want to know how to help one, we’re here. Call us at 805.683.2838 or find us online: https://www.villamajella.org/.
Bridget Bottoms is director of Events and Outreach for Villa Majella.
