InsideNoVa.com has just published an article, “How this Northern Virginia nonprofit saved a local woman’s life” about Pathway Homes and one of the people it has helped over the years. See the full article.
How this Northern Virginia nonprofit saved a local woman’s life
Pathway Homes provides housing, support services to adults with mental illness
For InsideNoVa – 2/9/2024
As a teenager in Springfield, Sue Zywokarte was diagnosed with depression and borderline personality disorder.
“My first hospitalization was when I was 18,” she said. “Over the next 20 years, I think I was hospitalized 25 times and ended up with substance abuse issues to deal with all the feelings and trouble I was having.”
When she needed a place to stay, Zywokarte would rent a room, sleep on someone’s couch or sleep in her car before discovering the nonprofit organization Pathway Homes in 2002.
Pathway Homes, based in Fairfax, provides housing and supportive services to adults with serious mental illness and other disabilities in Northern Virginia and Washington. The organization follows a housing-first model, which says housing is not a privilege but a right, and does not place time limits on its housing services.
“For the first two years, I was having a lot of problems and was in and out of the hospital still, but Pathways didn’t drop me,” Zywokarate said. “They stuck with me, and I had therapy twice a week, and then there was support to help me.”
