Looking back at her life before she started working with New Door Ventures, Anabel can hardly believe how far she has come. “Before I started working with New Door, my life was horribly unpredictable. I had just gotten out of my housing and gotten on food stamps. I didn’t have a high school education. I would spend most days just wandering around the city. It was kind of an empty existence.”

Listening to her talk her about her life now, “a complete turnaround” almost seems an understatement.

Anabel came to New Door in 2008 and was placed in an internship in Ashbury Images, our screen-printing business. Eager to grasp her opportunity, she impressed her managers with her hard work and positive attitude, always looking to learn new things and take on extra responsibilities.

“It was like a big hole in my life got completed with this job. It made me feel really good that I could actually do a job - it was really enlightening and gave me a lot of self-esteem.”

So impressed were her managers at Ashbury Images that, once she had completed her six-month internship, they offered her a permanent, full-time job. Now supervising other youth interns at Ashbury, Anabel is a role model to show what they too can achieve.

Though rightly proud of her own achievements, Anabel is quick to acknowledge the support that New Door provided along the way.

“I had a case manager – Carin - she worked with me not only at work but also to get my GED. I had dropped out of high school early and she helped me get that. Sometimes, when you’ve been in a lifestyle like mine, you need that person to keep pushing you, to keep you going and to give you reasons why you should. And anytime I felt like I had a problem at work, I could let her know and she was able to put it in perspective for me and help me work through it.”

“If I hadn’t had that person at New Door to support me along the way, I think I would have ended up not knowing what to do and having nowhere to turn and having just a bunch of problems and not seeing any solutions. I might have just stopped coming here. And that would have been awful. I’d still be angry and depressed and feel no self-worth at all.”