40% of Americans are one paycheck away from being homeless.

If that’s hard so that you can picture, you’re not alone. Katrina Bostick, who began her profession in social work, had seen her fair proportion of human tragedy and yet she still didn’t realize how close she was to the homelessness epidemic.

“Like lots of us, I had a particular picture in my head once I heard the term homeless,” Bostick said. “The pictures are devastating—people living in underpasses, sleeping on sidewalks and the like.”

For this reason perception, she said she mostly focused on helping other groups that needed assistance other than those that were houseless while completing field work for her master’s degree. But with the assistance of her then manager that supervised her field work, she became open to the potential for supporting misplaced individuals. It was then that she said her profession merged together with her true purpose.

“A lightbulb went off,” Bostick said. “These are families I connected to once I went to a Walmart or a Starbucks or Goal, you already know, on a regular basis life, not knowing that once I left to get in my automotive, the automotive next to me was actually any person’s home.”

This newfound passion for homelessness intervention led her to start part-time work in 2013 with Family Promise of the Coastal Empire, a Georgia-based organization that focuses on providing resources to low-income families.

“I’d accomplished my practicum with Family Promise after I graduated with the master’s, but I continued to remain connected to the organization and asked the then executive director, ‘how can I help?’ And she or he told me I could pick up where she left off because she was leaving for one more opportunity. That’s when my life truly modified.”

She was appointed executive director of Family Promise’s Savannah, Georgia chapter in 2015. Then in 2020, became the director of the newly formed Family Promise of the Coastal Empire, the results of a merger between Savannah, Effingham and Bryan County affiliates. She spends time constructing programs designed to support families with housing resources, jobs and skill development. One among the newest initiatives features a partnership with Google, wherein about 2,500 scholarships were to earn various Google certifications.

“These are self paced training that individuals can hook up with to assist increase their income, and enable them to work from anywhere in order that those families that will have barriers with childcare would learn an especially employable skill to assist move them out of poverty. Because that’s the final word goal. How will we not only break the cycle of homelessness with families that we hook up with, but how will we move these families out of poverty?”

For her, that’s what it’s all about.