May 5, 2026 – Atlanta, GA
The morning Katy Lovett’s case worker showed up at her apartment in Nashville, Georgia, Katy lied to her face.
She had promised herself she wouldn’t drink the night before, but she hadn’t kept that promise. And when the case worker asked her whether she had been drinking, Katy looked her right in the eye and said no.
“She said, ‘You know we can test you,'” Katy recalls. “I did not know that.”
What followed was a moment that Katy, now two years sober, describes as the one that changed everything. Her case worker didn’t threaten or judge her. She simply said: I think you need help, and I don’t think you can do this by yourself.
“The threat of losing Peyton was what pushed me,” Katy says of her son, who was a toddler at the time. “In my mind, that pint the night before was like, a last hoorah. But as an alcoholic, looking back on it now and being sober, I’m like, yeah, no. You know better.”
She did know better. But knowing better and being able to act on it are two different things, and the distance between them is exactly where organizations like Our House do their best work.
Katy has a habit she will be the first to admit to, delivered with the kind of laugh that comes from genuine self-awareness. She always puts all her eggs in one basket. She did it with the first substance abuse program she called. She did it with Right Side Up, the Atlanta-based residential recovery program where she spent seven months getting sober, learning to be present for Peyton again, and beginning to understand that she had to do the work for herself before she could do it for him. And she did it with Our House.
She found Our House the way a lot of people do, a late-night online search for transitional housing, scrolling through options, looking for somewhere that would take both her and Peyton. When the name came up, she called the next morning.
The person who answered wasn’t supposed to be at that phone. She had wandered down to the front office at exactly the wrong moment, or exactly the right one, depending on how you look at it.
“I spilled my guts,” Katy says, laughing. “Because I’m not ashamed of my story.”
The woman on the other end met her with warmth and compassion. They talked through everything. She walked Katy through the process, told her exactly what to do, what to email, and what to expect next. By the end of the conversation, Katy had a clear path forward and the distinct feeling that someone was genuinely in her corner.
“She said, as soon as I have everything I need, you’ll have everything you need, and we’ll have an intake date for you,” Katy recalls. “I was like, wow. That sounds amazing.”
Then, almost as an afterthought, the woman mentioned she hadn’t introduced herself.
“I said, oh, I’m so sorry, I just got wrapped up in everything,” Katy says. “And she goes, no Katy, that is okay.”
It turned out she had been talking to the shelter director the entire time. Under normal circumstances, she wouldn’t have been the person who answered that phone, and yet on that day, she exactly where she needed to be.
“I feel like it was God,” Katy says quietly. “She was right there at the right time.”
The staff at Our House had a name for what Katy Lovett brought to her six months in the program. They called her a model client. She laughs when she says it but can’t hide the hint of pride.
She arrived at Our House with the only things she had room to carry: a plan and the determination to see it through.
Every morning, she and Peyton were up by 5 a.m. By 6:13 they were on the bus. Because her job required her to be at work by 8 a.m., she had to leave before Our House’s Early Childhood Education program opened for the day. Katy enrolled Peyton in a pre-K program near her workplace so she could get him settled and still make it to work on time. She would drop him off, get herself to work, and come back to Our House in the evenings to eat dinner, do chores, and get Peyton to bed before doing it all over again the next day. On weekends, she spent her time researching apartments, building her savings, and mapping out next steps.
“Six months doesn’t seem like a lot of time,” she says, with the authority of someone who has done the math. “But if you just focus your energy and time on what you need to focus on, rather than thinking, okay cool, I’ve got six months with no bills, you can accomplish so much.”
What surprised her most about Our House was the degree of trust it extended to its residents. After months in a structured residential recovery program where every financial transaction required advance notice and every movement was accounted for, Our House felt like a revelation. She had her own room and bathroom. There was a sign-out sheet in the morning and a 7 p.m. curfew, and in between, the day was hers.
“I was like, I’m sorry, what?” she says, still amused by the memory. “So I can just leave?”
She could. And she made good use of every hour of her days there.
What she didn’t anticipate was the community she and Peyton would find there. The boy he met in the shelter became like a brother to him, and the friendship has outlasted their time in the program by more than a year. As it happens, the two families ended up as neighbors, living in the same apartment complex where Katy has spent this past year rebuilding her life.
One of the things Katy mentions with reverence, the way people mention things that have changed their lives, is Our House Health.
She’d long suspected that Peyton might have autism or ADHD. She had raised it with his other doctors, who initially dismissed her concerns. Later she was told it could take up to six months just to get a testing appointment, and then longer for results. She had mostly set it aside as a problem to solve later.
Then she mentioned it to someone at the Our House Health clinic.
“They said they could set up an appointment in about a week,” she says. “I was like, are you kidding me? Are you sure?”
They were sure. Within a week, Peyton had been evaluated. Within another week, Katy had her results. He was diagnosed with autism and ADHD, answers that would have taken months to chase down through other channels, and that she now had the foundation to act on.
“Getting that testing for him was a really big surprise,” she says quietly. “I was just glad I was able to get it.”
For Katy, Our House Health has granted access to primary care, mental health medications and appointments, and specialty testing for her son, all at no cost, and none of it dependent on insurance she didn’t have.
She still visits Our House Health, and so does Peyton. Their last appointment was just last Monday, and the fact that she mentions it so naturally is its own kind of testament to what Our House Health has meant to their family. For a single mother who spent years without reliable access to healthcare, the ability to simply show up is not something she takes lightly.
“It’s important,” she says simply. “People need to utilize those resources.”
There is something Katy wants people to understand about alcoholism that gets lost when people think of addiction in the abstract. Sobriety requires a discipline that’s practiced every single day.
“You see alcohol everywhere,” she says. “You don’t see crack laying around. You don’t see drugs laying around. You don’t see pills lying around. I’m not trying to dismiss people who are addicted to other substances. I’m just saying I don’t have to search for alcohol. It’s everywhere. Literally.”
In the early days, reminders and triggers were part of every day. She describes walking into Kroger every week, the produce section in the front and the alcohol in the back, visible from almost anywhere in the store. The bus rides past liquor stores. The job promotions celebrated at bars. The friends who want to grab drinks on a Friday.
“They don’t ask me to go do heroin,” she says. “They’re asking to go have drinks.”
It is the kind of insight that only comes from having walked the specific path she walked, and she shares it without self-pity, more as a matter of fact that she wants people to understand. The work of staying sober isn’t a thing you do once. It’s a thing you keep choosing in a world that is not arranged to make it particularly easy.
Katy is, by every measure, winning that fight. And a year after leaving Our House what she says she is most proud of is not the job, or the apartment, or the income that has grown by $20,000 in the span of a year. It is her sobriety and her ability to keep Peyton stable, on schedule and making sure that whatever was happening around them, he felt safe.
“Being strong in everything that I do for him is amazing,” she says. “I’m just glad that he can look up to me now and be happy and proud of who we are.”
This time last year, Katy was sleeping in her room at Our House.
Today, she is surrounded by moving boxes, preparing to leave her one-bedroom apartment in Atlanta for a two-bedroom, two-bath apartment in the suburbs. Peyton will finally have his own room. There will be a garage for the car she recently bought. They’ll have access to a pool and a fitness center; and in a few weeks, she’ll start a new managerial position that comes with a $20,000 annual salary increase.
She found the job the way she finds most things: by paying attention, taking a chance, and following through when the moment arrived. Since leaving Our House she has also started school online, working toward a degree in medical coding and billing.
“Everything is going up for us,” she says. And then, because she is Katy, she laughs. “I’m over the moon right now. I’m packing and I don’t even like packing and moving. But I’m just over the moon.”
When she thinks about what she would say to those who are considering supporting Our House, she reaches for the truth of what it felt like to be where she was, and then to be where she is now.
“I would be on the street if it was not for Our House,” she says. “Literally. Our House provided me with a way to thrive and not just survive. They gave me support to the max. I was able to utilize a lot of the resources they offer, and I still use the clinic. I will still pop in and be like, hey, is Ms. Kate busy?”
She pauses. “I wouldn’t be where I am today if it wasn’t for their help and their support.”
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Our House serves more than 2,200 children and adults each year, providing long-term shelter, early childhood education, comprehensive healthcare, employment training, and wraparound support to Atlanta families experiencing or at risk of homelessness. To support families like Katy’s and help create more stories of stability, healing, and hope, visit https://ourhousega.org/make-a-gift/
