The Paul Stefan Foundation, which offers a home and love to mothers in crisis pregnancies, is expanding from two houses in Unionville to a 30-room regional maternity housing and educational center in Orange. The Unionville houses eventually will be used as stepping stones to independent living.
The new center is unique in the state due to its size, the length of time women and their babies can stay and its on-site educational component, according to co-founder Randy James.
The residences and educational programs will be housed in what was once the President Madison Inn, a stately brick structure built in the mid-1920s. Through partnerships with local teachers, retired educators and the Virginia Initiative for Employment Not Welfare, the Paul Stefan Foundation will provide education at the Orange location in the culinary arts, cosmetology, and personal care assistant and certified nursing assistant certifications.
“We are not just a shelter,” said Randy. “We are a program that meets these women where they are at the time they come to us, and then we figure out a course of action from there.”
A daycare and a fitness center also are in the works, as is a commercial kitchen that can be used to feed the needy in the surrounding community.
The two current residences house around eight women for up to 18 months. The new facility, which Randy hopes will open its first set of rooms in May or June, will provide a homey space for three times as many women for up to five years.
Randy and his wife, Evelyn, also a co-founder, said a minimum wage job is not enough for women to create a future for themselves and their children. The goal of the educational center is to give them the skills they need to break out of poverty and despair. “And that takes time,” said Evelyn.
Dearest to their hearts is the foundation’s pro-life mission, born nine months after the death of the couple’s sixth child, Paul Stefan, in 2005. After an ultrasound indicated the baby had no lungs, Evelyn was encouraged to have a late-term abortion. Instead, she carried the child to term. If they’d chosen death over life, “we would have never known the true joy and love of seeing and holding Paul for an hour in our arms before he passed,” said Randy. With the encouragement of Father Stefan Starzynski, now parochial vicar of St. Timothy Church in Chantilly, they created the foundation in Paul Stefan’s memory.
The center, said Randy, will ensure “that any woman contemplating an abortion will have a safe haven to come and live to save the baby.”
How to help
To support the Paul Stefan Foundation and its new regional maternity housing and educational center, go here, call 540/379-7077 or 540/854-2300, or email [email protected].
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