After settling into York Habitat house, mom again opens her home to foster kids

After being evicted from her home following a cancer diagnosis, Jennifer Montalvo needed a more secure living situation for her and her children. She turned to York Habitat for Humanity.

​Jennifer Montalvo was raising two foster care children and two of her own when she received the diagnosis. She had stage IV Hodgkin’s lymphoma.

This wasn’t Jennifer’s first fight against cancer. Her oldest son recently had finished treatment for leukemia. The family barely had recovered from his weekly trips to Philadelphia for care.

Through nine months of intensive chemotherapy, Jennifer lost not only her hair but her job. She was recovering when a late rental payment landed the sheriff on the doorstep of her four-bedroom house.
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“He’s like, ‘Hey, you gotta go,’” Jennifer says, “and I’m like, ‘where?’”

A reason to dance

Jennifer and the children moved into her mom’s one-bedroom apartment, then into an even smaller space. She had to stop fostering and turned her focus to survival. 

Her uncle encouraged her to look into York Habitat for Humanity. He had built his home through Habitat in Harrisburg years earlier, and Jennifer remembered helping him, working alongside the family to complete the hours of sweat equity required of homebuyers.

She turned in her application and hoped for the best.

A month later, she received a call. Her application had been approved.
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​“I was outside, looking like a crazy lady dancing next to my car, and everybody’s watching me through the window,” Jennifer laughs. 

Building sweat equity

For months, Jennifer spent every free moment between work and raising kids to complete her sweat-equity hours. She built walls, plastered, painted, and installed floors as her new home sprang from a pile of dirt into a glorious three-story structure. Just the first floor was bigger than her family’s apartment had been. 

Finally, it was time to move in. 

“We were here the night before, setting up outside, putting up welcome-home mats and the welcome-home sign,” Jennifer says. “The kids were excited.”

Not long after settling in, she was ready once again to open her home to foster kids. In the four years that Jennifer has been in her York Habitat for Humanity house, she has provided a temporary home for nearly 20 foster children while raising her own four.

“It should be nice to give another kid a home that doesn’t have a home or has a broken home,” she says.

Having a place to call her own has made all the difference for Jennifer. She never worries about coming home to find an eviction notice on her door. She has found her forever home and is excited not only to share that with her foster kids but to have an asset to pass down to her children.
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“Once you start doing Habitat it’s like a burden has been lifted off your shoulders,” she says. “It’s like, ‘OK, I’m looking forward to moving into a new house, something that’s mine, something that’s forever.’”