Belinda McGee (Nia Imani)
Belinda Pittman McGee is a survivor. Growing up the fifth of six children born to the Rogers Family in Monticello Arkansas, she may not have had much, but she had a grandfather who poured positivity into her life.
Following the death of her beloved grandfather, Eugene Cross, she moved to Pontiac, Michigan to live with her sister and after traveling back and forth between Pontiac, MI and Milwaukee where her parents have lived since 1969, she stopped her formal education in ninth grade. She later received her GED and by the age of 18, she was married with three children—Felicia, Gaynell and Kendricke. At the age of 31, McGee finally left an abusive marriage and ended up in a shelter for the homeless.
When McGee was able to leave the shelter, she worked to support herself and her children as a home manager, for a program to curb truancy in Milwaukee Public Schools, as a Community Outreach Specialist at UWM-Extension, and she facilitated women support groups at the Benedict Center and taught independent living skills to young adults aging out of foster care. She also started a cleaning business—whatever it took to survive and take care of her family. In her darkest times, like so many of the women she now works to empower, she was on public assistance.
The turning point for McGee was when she was staying in a homeless shelter and heard one of the women say to another, “I’ll see you at ‘home’ this evening.”
“It struck me that these women considered the shelter their ‘home’. This was not the first time many of these women had been to the shelter. Their stays were short-term, they often returned to their abusive situations, and they had been in and out of the shelter for so long that they considered it to be their home. I knew I had to do something to change this mindset and this cycle, so that was the catalyst for Nia Imani,” said McGee.
Prior to his passing, McGee’s grandfather had always told her, “If you believe that you can climb Mount Everest, you can. If you get stuck, back up and rethink, but never give up.” The memory of those words helped McGee, along with a friend, launch Nia Imani Family, Inc. in 1994.
“The homeless shelter was not home for me and I didn’t want to consider it as my home. My goal was to get back on my feet again and find housing for my family. The number one reason women end up back in shelters is because of their lack of financial resources. They don’t have a security deposit, rent or employment to sustain their families.
“My friend and I had witnessed the profound need to serve women, especially African American, who did not know how to break the generational cycles of addiction, poverty, trauma, violence, abuse, homelessness, and learned helplessness. I started meeting with the women who lived in the shelter. I gained their trust, talked to them about their needs and I promised them that I was going to start a house for women to help them live independently,” she said.
In order to make a lasting difference for women and their children, McGee knew that the program she started would need to offer long-term stability and safe housing. She also wanted the facility to have a family-like atmosphere, where the women could experience what a stable family environment felt like. She wanted a place for women and their children to address the trauma of instability, abuse and violence in their past so that healing could begin. As they begin to heal, she then wanted to be able to focus on developing and expanding their basic life competencies, bonding and parenting their children, and connecting with a broader community.
“Nia Imani does all those things and more. We house between and 10-14 women and their children, birth to age five. They can stay for up to 24 months. The goal is to get them ready to live independently within one year, but if a mother isn’t ready within that timeframe, we extend it up to another year. During their stay, they receive employment training, save money and prepare for transition. When they leave here, they have furniture, (which is acquired through donations), money for security deposits, and they have received help with financial planning and budgeting. We work with them so they do not have to live in poverty. Some mothers go on to get their GEDs, and some have gone on technical school or college. We take it slowly, teaching them one thing at a time so that it does not become overwhelming,” said McGee.
Nia Imani is unique in that each woman has her own apartment to live in and maintain. The facility also has a family center for all the mothers to meet and sit for social time, and a place for children to gather and play.
“Many of these women have never lived on their own. They receive training in the basics, including culinary arts, where they learn to cook and are taught nutrition skills and meal preparation. We have individuals from the outside come in to work with our moms,” said McGee.
Nia Imani not only works with mothers to help ensure they are able to raise their children in safe and healthy environments, but working with the children is another integral component.
“We find that both mothers and their children have been traumatized. Oftentimes this is manifested when the child has ADHD, short attention spans, they stutter, or babies cry all the time. Traumatic events are just as stressful for children—they are moving all the times and in many cases, children have been abused or neglected. We get the children in to see doctors as quickly as possible. These traumatic incidents are sometimes manifested physically, so children are sick all the time,” said McGee.
“Abuse can be generational. We had one young woman come through our program whose mother and grandmother had both been in the program; we’re talking about three generations of abuse! We previously took in mothers with older children, but we’ve learned that we can more effectively work with the children if we take them in when they are younger.
“We had a child that was suspended from school in the first grade. How does a little boy in first grade get suspended? We recognized the trauma and are addressing it, so now we have a child who is more calm. It’s difficult to predict how trauma affects a child, but I don’t see working with mother without working with the child. It just doesn’t work,” she said.
McGee has endured and overcome her own issues with her children who are now adults and all but one lives out of state.
“I spent the majority of my life working, researching and trying to teach myself these things to help families. I either was in school or found people to work with me. For the most part, I’m self-taught. When my children became adults, they shared with me how my lifestyle had affected them. They thought I was more interested in other things and not them. They understand now what I was trying to do and they are proud of me, but we had to talk these things through as they got older,” said McGee.
Now married to Corthal McGee, her husband of almost 20 years, McGee has received local and national recognition for her work with Nia Imani. She is currently working with the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee to document data on the effectiveness of her shelter model to determine the number of women who remain independent once leaving her facility.
“I want to help mothers and children. I may not have the education credentials, but I have lived and survived abuse. I know what it’s like to live in that situation, but I also know that’s it is possible to leave, survive and thrive. That’s what I want for the families we serve at Nia Imani—for mothers to be able to provide their children with a better life,” said McGee.