Life changed in an instant for Ragina Smith on April 18, 2023, when her husband of five years was killed in a motorcycle accident. 

“One night he left and just didn’t come back,” Smith said. “He only had the bike three months.” 

The couple was living in Jacksonville, Florida, where Smith, 43, worked as a property manager and also as a caretaker for her husband — a retired Army veteran with post-traumatic stress disorder and schizophrenia. The sudden loss, Smith said, threw her into instant turmoil. 

“I tried to hold on. I tried to stay above water emotionally, but was just showing up halfway,” she said. “I turned to drinking alcohol. I was drinking beer quite a bit.”

Smith’s mother and adult children in Artesia begged her to leave Florida and stay with them back in her home state, which she did.

“I thought that maybe coming home would be better, but it wasn’t any better,” Smith said. “I realized it wasn’t the kind of support I needed.”

Smith continued to drink, cycling in and out of anger and depression. After talking for an hour on a crisis helpline, an agent convinced her to check into LifeHouse Villa De Esperanza, a detox facility in nearby Carlsbad. 

“I’ll never forget how mad my mom was when I put myself in a detox,” Smith said. “It was supposed to be three to seven days, but they offered me 30 days and I stayed 30 days.”

Smith said her mother hadn’t been aware of the extent of her drinking, because she’d hid much of it from her.

“She’d say: ‘But you don’t drink hard alcohol. You didn’t hit rock bottom. You didn’t lose everything,’” Smith said. “But I lost myself and I had to figure that out.”

She said as difficult as 30 days in detox was, the work began in earnest after she left. Her peer counselor at LifeHouse advised her to consider the programs offered at TenderLove Community Center in Albuquerque, because she’d been there herself.

“She told me I needed more time to get situated,” Smith said. “I knew that I needed to deal with the anger, the grief, the trauma, the fear. The alcohol was just part of the problem.”

‘I didn’t know places like this existed’ 

Against her family’s wishes, Smith traveled 250 miles north to Albuquerque to live in TenderLove’s recovery house with 11 other women. As a widow with adult children, she said she’d lost a sense of purpose.

“The housing situation in Artesia wasn’t ideal,” Smith said. “I didn’t like who I was becoming, and I was afraid. You kind of have to rebuild yourself.”

Since 2013, TenderLove has helped women recovering from trauma, domestic violence, incarceration, sex trafficking, poverty and homelessness through job training and life skills programs. In addition to the community center, it operates two single-family homes — the recovery house that accommodates 12 single women, and a transitional house for women and their children — large enough for five families. Clients are offered housing for six months to two years, depending on the programs they’re enrolled in and their progress toward sobriety.

This summer, for the first time, TenderLove has plans to rent a single-family home to accommodate youth experiencing homelessness for up to 12 months.

Founder and CEO, Debbie Johnson, experienced homelessness herself after moving to the U.S. from Nigeria in 2001. She landed in Albuquerque in 2011 and opened TenderLove two years later.

“When I got out of all those ugly situations, I started thinking about homeless people,” Johnson said. “I was homeless. Not because I did anything wrong or anything bad, but because of circumstances that were beyond my control.” 

Most of TenderLove’s staff are current or former clients.

“They all have stories and they just need help to get them out of that [trauma] cycle,” Johnson said.

Clients learn computer literacy, how to build a website, money management and budgeting, parenting skills and best practices for a job interview. 

“We don’t just say: ‘This is what you need.’ We’ll let them tell us where they want to be in three months and six months and a year,” Johnson said. “We also have a lot of employers that believe in what we do and they don’t look at [a client’s] past.”

Smith arrived at TenderLove about five months ago and immediately began its 12-month sewing and fashion design program. Participants make their own graduation gowns as a final project and receive sewing machines on graduation day. Smith is also working toward a community health worker certification and earning her commercial driver’s license.

She’s received trauma therapy and has been able to apply for veterans benefits and enroll in health care.

“I’m not in that same state of mind that I was,” Smith said. “I’m more positive and more goal-oriented. I’ve been able to save my money. I just bought a car.”

She said TenderLove gave her a safe place to heal, grieve and lash out away from her family.

“Anything could have happened. I could have gotten a DUI. I could have taken somebody’s life, or my own,” she said. “I didn’t even know places like this existed.”