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Kadisha

Brooklyn

“Keep your head up. Don’t let anybody make you feel like you are less than a person when you’re not.”

An unsafe domestic situation forced Kadisha to enter the shelter system with her daughter, who was a toddler at the time.

“It was really, really hard,” she recalled.

Because the shelter she lived in was in Queens, Kadisha would have to get up at 5 a.m. some mornings to get her daughter to school in Brooklyn. She would then have to hop on a train to get to her job in Manhattan and repeat the same route every evening.

It took Kadisha a year and a half to get out of the shelter system. During that time, she struggled with depression, but Kadisha’s advice for parents and families living in shelter is to persevere.

“Keep your head up,” she said. “Don’t let anybody make you feel like you are less than a person when you’re not.”

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