Sarah S House

When Anita Carroll sees a woman who has spent 13 years at home raising children, she sees an experienced manager, a budget wizard and a model of patience.When her clients see those qualifications on their resumes, it often changes their ideas about themselves.One woman stood there and cried. "Then she started jumping up and down saying, `This is me! This is me!' " Carroll recalled of one of the first women in the Sarah's House employment program. "When they see that in black and white, that gives them an ego boost."

Student leaders from Anne Arundel secondary schools are collecting baby goods in a project to help Sarah's House shelter at Fort Meade, with help from Procter & Gamble Co. and BJ's Wholesale Club."

The Light House shelter on West Street in Annapolis has been providing the homeless a life preserver on a cold winter night since 1988. Now, Annapolis Area Ministries Inc., the nonprofit group that runs the shelter, is preparing an anchor.The Anchor House, a program starting this fall, will be Annapolis' first experiment with placing families in long-term housing. Two large houses are being readied for three families to call home for as long as a year."We've gone beyond the soup kitchen and the storefront mission where people would get a meal and hear a message and go on their way," said Toni Graff, executive director of Annapolis Area Ministries.

Besides playing video games and hanging out with their friends afterschool, what Larry, 9, and William, 7, miss the most is riding bikes.The brothers, now living at Sarah's House, a county homeless shelter, with their mother and younger sister, said there's only one bike to ride, and it has a flat tire. Besides, there's really nowhere toride bikes around the Fort Meade shelter.But a community-based effort to build a playground and bike path at Sarah's House will resolve the problem when they are completed andbicycles are donated.

Last year in Maryland, 6,440 children under 18 years old were homeless. To help meet the needs of this growing problem, Sarah's House wasopened four years ago.Located in Fort Meade, Sarah's House consists of five World War II barracks renovated for emergency shelter andtransitional housing.Sarah's House is a joint venture between Anne Arundel County, theArmy and the Associated Catholic Charities. Although supported by local, state and federal money, private donations are greatly needed. Items such as infant and children's clothes, diapers, baby bottles, shampoo, deodorant, soap, towels, wash cloths and cleaning supplies, aswell as money, are being accepted.

Two months of medical leave gave Judi Miller ample time to reflect. As the Glenwood resident recovered from surgery, it was the support of her friends that helped mend her spirit. “I thought about how fortunate I was to have so many great friends in my corner helping me. And I thought about what it would be like for people who don't have that kind of cheering section,” she says. What resulted was a small but growing network of women and girls in western Howard County who are quietly doing great things.

Not long after they began living their dream of owning a dance studio in their new hometown of Columbia 25 years ago, two sisters from Michigan watched that dream go up in flames - the seven-alarm kind. Six years before tragedy struck, Diane Andrews and Mary Harper had decided to combine their artistic and entrepreneurial skills and become studio owners and artistic directors. Ready to take that leap of faith in June 1987, they rented a space and hustled to spread the word. “No one knew who we were,” recalls Harper, who had followed her older sister from Michigan, where they had cultivated reputations as performers and teachers.