Before taking the stage at the national book launch for The Three Melissas: A Practical Guide to Surviving Family Homelessness, three mothers posed for a selfie. The women, all coincidentally named Melissa, raised their children while experiencing homelessness. Their smiles and pleasant demeanor hid the struggles and trauma they’ve lived through, experiences described in this unparalleled guidebook to help families survive homelessness.
One of the Melissas lost her home after fleeing domestic abuse, another was evicted after becoming too ill to work, and the third lost her home in a hurricane. But these strong women consider surviving homelessness their superpower and have done everything in their ability to keep their children safe. Now, they are focused on empowering other parents by highlighting the lessons they’ve learned in the compact blue book bearing their names.
Diane Nilan and Diana Bowman, the authors of The Three Melissas, have more than seventy-five years of homelessness advocacy and professional experience between them. Their goal, Nilan says, is to “create a unique self-help manual based on the Melissas’ practical advice and lived experiences for families, especially mothers, navigating homelessness.” Proceeds from the book’s sales will benefit the three moms.
The book also provides a valuable resource for social workers, teachers, school administrators, medical staff, and policymakers, describing the day-to-day obstacles the Melissas faced to keep their children safe and out of the child welfare system. The Melissas also identify public policies that can better address family homelessness, such as broadening the definition of homelessness.
Melissa N. is a fifty-three-year-old mother of three from Florida. She was struggling with unstable housing before she lost her home after Hurricane Ivan in 2004. She tells The Progressive that for thousands of others now impacted by recent Hurricanes Helene and Milton, homelessness will be inevitable and long-lasting.
“The plight of recovery goes way beyond the absolute horror and devastation of having to endure the daunting, heart wrenching journey back to a place that was once your home,” she says, recalling her own misfortune after Ivan plunged her and her children deeper into homelessness. She eventually bought a Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) trailer supplied by the government after the storm, but almost lost the new home when a sewage problem shut down the trailer park and all residents were evicted.
Melissa N. explains that when families that lose their homes are able to repair, rebuild, or replace their homes, they still have to find the courage, strength, and resources to work through the mentally draining steps of recovery.
“After all the cleanup is done, belongings are painfully rummaged through and a life once known is hauled away like garbage on trash day, continued wrap-around support services for these businesses, schools, individuals, families, and children become more crucial than ever before,” she says, adding that safe and secure housing should not be reserved only for the upper class.
“Compassion, understanding, and the creation of support services is not an idea to be pushed under the rug,” she says. “It is a requirement for the survival and continued growth of all people.”
When families become homeless, they are on their own in a brutal world that offers them little to no help. The Melissas jumped at the opportunity to share their hard-earned knowledge.
Appreciative of the prospect to help other families, Melissa A., the thirty-eight-year-old mother of seven from Chicago explained in the book: “You learn lessons from struggle.”
“I think the best lesson for every human being is to start off poor,” Melissa A. continued. “You learn to be humble and appreciative of little things. My kids know how hard it is to work for the American dollar; they don’t feel entitled. Five years ago, my son was opening Christmas presents, and after two presents, he stopped and said, ‘That’s enough.’ He’s humble and appreciative.”
In surviving homelessness, Melissa A. learned how to determine what’s important and what’s not, like what weekly essentials you can transport on a bus. She also learned not to accept things from people that you don’t need and to protect the things that are the most valuable to you.
“I learned that my kids and I would survive,” wrote Melissa A., adding, “I no longer have any fear, just a sense that we’ll get through this. Homelessness was devastating, but angels always came to help us.”
According to co-authors Nilan and Bowman, schools play a vital role in supporting children experiencing homelessness, and education is the clearest path to a stable and self-sufficient adulthood. The women have devoted their lives to the implementation of the McKinney-Vento Homelessness Assistance Act, a federal law that ensures schools support children experiencing homelessness. The law requires each school district to have a homeless liaison.
“Unfortunately, for many different reasons, liaisons may not receive adequate training or understand the full scope of the resources the Act provides,” Nilan tells The Progressive.
Hear Us
Mary Haskett, Diane Nilan, Melissa T., Melissa A., Melissa N., and Diana Bowman pose for a photo at the book launch for "The Three Melissas" in North Carolina.
In their survival guide, the three Melissas encourage other parents experiencing homelessness to build rapport with their school’s homeless liaison. Often, it is the liaison who connects the family with resources like tutoring, clothes and shoes, school supplies, snacks, and after school programs.
“It took a couple of visits before I was comfortable trusting her, but once I did, she was priceless,” says Melissa T., the fifty-year-old mother of two from Kansas. “I never knew of a homeless liaison, but then again, I had never been homeless either.”
In addition to helping her daughters, the liaison introduced Melissa T. to Nilan, who helped her get an apartment. Before they secured housing, she and her family endured many forms of homelessness.
When the family first became homeless, a friend let her and her two girls stay in a spare room for six weeks.
“After those six weeks, which really wasn’t realistically enough time when you’re starting from ground zero, we began our odyssey of homelessness, living and bouncing from stranger’s house to stranger’s house,” Melissa T. says. “But because of [the liaison] and [Nilan], and my big mouth, I learned how to network and advocate a little better for myself in the homeless arena.”
In the book, Melissa T. points to the many ways schools are required to assist homeless students. If a child qualifies as homeless under the McKinney-Vento Act, which has a more comprehensive definition than the Housing and Urban Development (HUD) provides, they are eligible for resources to ensure school stability.
Each of the Melissas identified the same systemic issue affecting how homelessness is addressed: the different definitions of “homeless” used by different federal agencies.
HUD excludes many families living in nontraditional shared housing situations (often referred to as “doubling up”) or staying in cheap motels on their own dime. In March 2024, the agency reported that over 650,000 people were experiencing homelessness, including more than 111,600 children under the age of eighteen. But the number is much higher than HUD says. By contrast, the Department of Education reported that schools identified 1.2 million children experiencing homelessness—and even that is an undercount. Some schools still fail to identify homeless students, and the school census does not include babies, toddlers, and young people not yet enrolled in school.
Nilan says that excluding “invisible” unhoused families—mainly mothers with children—from HUD’s official homeless count vastly understates the scope of homelessness, neglecting many parents and caretakers who are struggling to keep their children safe. Funding to address homelessness remains shamefully inadequate.
Bowman adds that the emphasis has always focused on the more visible chronically homeless adults, which inevitably shifts attention away from families experiencing homelessness. Pitting one group against the other is counterproductive. Ignoring the needs of families increases the risk of the children becoming homeless as adults.
“Families just aren’t in the picture and so, the resources have gone primarily to supporting adults without families, veteran homelessness, and chronically homeless adults,” Bowman said in an interview with NC Newsline. “Families have just gone under the radar.”
DeBorah Gilbert White, Ph.D., Director of Education for the National Coalition for the Homeless in Washington, D.C., traveled to Raleigh to support the Melissas and to celebrate the book launch. White, who has experienced homelessness herself, says federal agencies must declare housing as a human right and eliminate policies and practices that serve as barriers to accessing help.
“Connected closely to how we define homelessness is changing perceptions we hold as a society about people identified as homeless and the treatment of people based on housing status, specifically the criminalization of homelessness,” White says. “The passage of anti-discriminatory legislation locally, state-wide, and nationally are helpful.”