About Us
Ballast Haven Homes exists to create a stable living environment, so residents can reimagine and focus on rebuilding the future.
We want to create awareness of homelessness in our communities and offer tangible solutions through transitional housing that feels like home. That awareness, and our personal experiences of the power of home, is what started the Ballast Haven journey. Maya Angelou wrote “The ache for home lives in all of us. The safe place where we can go as we are and not be questioned”. When this kind of home exists, we believe it can be a catalyst for the rest of life to transform as well. As our desire to step into this ache grew, it became clear to us that we wanted to help provide home for others as they journey towards creating home for themselves.
Established in 2019, Ballast Haven Homes is the first organization in the county dedicated to creating stable, quality homes that serve as vessels on the journey forward. Transitional homes help people experience the stability of home as they work towards realizing hopes of renting or buying a dwelling of their own. Our desire is for our transitional homes to provide refuge and the promise of tomorrow. We want our homes to be places people can land while they transition from a hard season in life to a time of renewal and growth.
Our goals as an organization are simple, yet critical to this journey:
- Acquire housing suitable for individuals or families
- Refurbish the house to feel like home
- Provide the home as an available resource to our partner organizations battling homelessness
- Maintain the home so that it can serve others in the future
Who We Are (Ballast Haven)
Jay and Annie Brown, Co-Founders
Jay and Annie, both North Carolina natives, met in college at Campbell University. After finishing their degrees, getting married, and completing post-graduate studies, they permanently relocated to Winston-Salem and started a family. Now with three kids, they call Davie County home. Despite numerous changes, challenges, and opportunities for growth along the way, two things have remained constant, though sometimes in the background of life’s busyness: Jay’s burden for the homeless and Annie’s love for and belief in the healing powers of home. In 2018, the dream to combine Jay’s burden with Annie’s love gained steam as the path for how to make that happen became more and more clear. That’s when Ballast Haven Homes changed from a “what if” that was topic of many conversations throughout the years, to a budding reality.
Jay fully believes in going the extra mile and meeting the real, fundamental needs of others. Life quickly teaches that moving beyond homelessness is a team effort—one that requires food, water, and other basic necessities—but that also calls for more large scale involvement. Large scale anything seems to be built into Jay’s DNA. Thus, when Jay’s desire to help tackle homelessness started to become more than a dream, transitional housing was an exciting possibility that he was a ready to jump into.
While Jay is the big picture thinker, Annie takes joy in the smaller things. Growing up in a tight knit family, moving away from home, and then becoming a mom with a household of her own have all been events that grounded Annie and fed her love for making others feel at home as well. When Jay verbalized his desire to start providing transitional houses, Annie was poised to be part of making those houses feel like homes.
Although Ballast Haven Homes is a dream come to life, the dream didn’t originate in Jay and Annie alone and will not be successful and life giving without the support of board members, the community, partner organizations, and others. The Ballast Haven Homes team is eager to see what can happen when all of us together work to provide the promise of tomorrow through transitional homes.