SOMETIMES, IT’S the little, day-to-day kindnesses that change a person’s life, and two women at the St. Gianna Crisis Pregnancy Home embody that principle well. Amanda Ashley and Katie Cash serve as house managers, and they spend each day helping the mothers at St. Gianna prepare for their future.
Ashley worked as a community health worker before joining the home, and Cash was pursuing a career in management at Honey Baked Ham. Both felt personally led to their roles, and both have been an inspiration to their co-workers and those in their care.
As daytime house manager, Ashley helps with intake, locating resources like counseling referrals, SNAP benefits, and mentorship connections, as well as with the household itself. While a mother is at St. Gianna, she is provided with most of her basic needs free of charge, including shelter, evening meals, and maternity and baby items. This is possible because of the generosity of donors both inside and outside South Central Kentucky. Ashley is the one who makes sure they have what they need. That job is central to the purpose of St. Gianna.
“We want the mothers to embrace life, but it’s really important to give mothers that time of support financially, having all their basic needs met,” Ashley said. “That way, they can not only save the money to get themselves on their feet with their family but just kind of be able to take a breath and not live in that state of stress. And that way, they can go forward in their life with their babies.”
Ashley can relate personally to the women she serves, having gone through a crisis pregnancy herself. She was homeless for a time and without a place like St. Gianna to turn to. Still, she wasn’t alone.
“I really just had to kind of pull myself up by the bootstraps, but I had a lot of women that came to me in my life that were very supportive, and that really helped me out a lot with just leadership and advice,” Ashley said. “I just felt really, really called to do this work because I had been helped in that way.”
Cash said she also had a deep understanding of the circumstances the women she serves are facing, but her call to action came from a series of coincidences one Sunday on the way to and during Mass. At the time, she lived south of Nashville and was on her way to the Fathers of Mercy gathering in Auburn, Kentucky. St. Gianna came up in a sermon she was listening to during the drive, again in the Mass itself, and then a third time when a family member suggested she would be a good fit for the organization. At the time, Cash had just begun a career in management, and she didn’t understand why she would have gotten that comment.
“Why would she say that?” Cash said. “She knows that I have this job that I’m doing really well in — and in that moment that she said that, I knew that I was being called to do it.”
Cash is now the live-in evening house manager, assisting the women in the home with dinner prep, chores, and preparing for the next day. It hasn’t been easy changing careers, and it’s a job that has required her to grow in her faith.
“I was already a person of faith, but I have fought a lot of spiritual warfare since coming here, and I’ve had no choice but to become stronger,” Cash said.
She has found hope in the relationships formed between the women in the house.
“Sometimes they’re each other’s greatest support, and I think that that’s been a beautiful thing to see,” Cash said. “That’s definitely something that gives me hope and was a pleasant surprise because you never know, with living with women, how that’s going to go.”
Both women have hope for the organization’s future. Ashley hopes that one day, the organization will grow and have the capacity for more women and that St. Gianna may one day be able to take in mothers with an extra child. For Bowling Green as a whole, she hopes more women in the community find the mentorship they need, especially those in crisis.
“I hope that I can speak with each of these women [and] help them feel like they deserve more and [that] they deserve a great life, and so does their child,” Ashley said. “They can live a life that they love and that’s really healthy for them.”
Through those everyday interactions, Ashley and Cash are helping mothers in crisis do just that. Their compassion and drive to serve are inspirations that stretch beyond St. Gianna to Bowling Green. It’s a lesson that anyone can learn from. GN
