Youth and Young Adult Stabilization Program Provides Hope

Madison Sheppard was just 8 years old when she first faced housing insecurity. That’s when her parents, who struggled to pay medical bills for her younger sister, moved the family into a hotel for a week before space opened in a family shelter. For the next seven years, they moved multiple times, including living with Madison’s grandmother and staying with her aunt and uncle, where Madison’s family of five crammed into one room.  

“I was falling asleep in class, and I was malnourished, and that kind of opened up the doors for a lot of bullying and judgment from both my peers and some teachers as well,” she said. “That was difficult for me to go through as a kid because I didn’t understand why these kids were making fun of me. I was a very kind child. My mom always told me that I would take the shirt off my back for others. That was my first time understanding that the world can be a cruel place.”  

She said she was a poor student as a child, largely due to depression and anxiety. “I wasn’t really able to tap into my full potential until I hit high school. I changed my mindset. I was determined to show people that I was smart. I started getting straight A’s doing honors courses.”  

Madison’s parents moved from Maine back to Massachusetts (Madison was born in Falmouth) just after she finished high school. Wanting to stay in Maine, she lived in a tent in a family member’s yard for a time and later shared a house with an ex-boyfriend. Eventually, she moved back into her grandmother’s house in Massachusetts with the rest of her family. Feeling that she needed to be on her own, she lived for three weeks in a car before finding an unheated camper in someone’s backyard she could rent. “At least there was a roof over my head,” she said.  

With financial support from Housing Assistance’s Youth and Young Adult Stabilization Program, Madison moved into an apartment in Centerville in November 2024. “It feels nice to be warm at night and not feel like a massive windstorm coming in is going to knock over the camper I’m in or someone’s going to be knocking on the car doors while I’m parked somewhere random trying to sleep,” she said.  

Although her own life hasn’t been easy, Madison, who recently turned 24, is determined to help others. A student in environmental studies at Cape Cod Community College, she works part-time jobs as an animal care technician, a dance instructor at the Cape Cod Children’s Museum, and with Belonging to Each Other, a homelessness prevention organization in Falmouth.  

“I went through a lot that no kid should ever go through, but I just want to say to anybody that may be reading this, just be kind to other people,” she said. “Nobody really knows what anyone’s going through and maybe a little act of kindness can make somebody’s day and give them hope to keep going for another day.”