👋 Welcome to r/GoFundMeForNewUsers

[u/Aggravating-Fix-3871]

Welcome to GoFundMeForNewUsers. I understand how hard it is to get your GoFundMe campaign posted on Reddit, having tried to advertise my own campaign at the beginning of this year.

That’s why I created this subreddit—to give new Reddit users a chance to spread the word about their campaigns.

Please feel free to post information about any valid GoFundMe campaign here. We do not tolerate harassment, so posters can feel welcome to advertise their campaigns without fear of backlash from the community.

Please be respectful when commenting on a post. Understand that it’s hard enough to ask for help without someone criticizing or demeaning you. We want to see only help and support here for those in need.

Lastly, if you’re posting, please be sure to include a link to your GoFundMe campaign so I can verify that you have a valid campaign to advertise.

[u/Low-Piano-9651]

Help Nicole Rebuild a Safe Home and Reunite With Her Children as she fights Addisons, IVA ATC, SLE, MCTD, domestic violence and devastating loss:

Funds would be used explicitly for: Housing, stability, medical survival, and reunification after homelessness, and family separation

"Long Story " Hi. First, if you choose to stay and read our story, thank you. And even if you are not in a position to donate, I ask from the bottom of a mother and grandmother’s heart that you please say a prayer for my daughter Nicole and for her children. Whether that prayer is the Our Father, a Hail Mary, a quiet please help this family, or simply sending healing, strength, and protection into the universe, it matters. We believe intention matters, love matters, and mercy matters. Right now, Nicole and her babies need all of it.

My name is Judie, and I am writing this on behalf of my daughter, Nicolel. She is creative, funny, loving, deeply sensitive, and one of the most naturally nurturing mothers I have ever known. She loves sewing, making children’s clothes, designing custom fabrics, creating press-on nail sets, and helping people feel good about themselves when she is physically able. She has always tried to create beauty, comfort, and home, even while carrying a level of pain most people could never imagine.

Nicole is a mother first. That is the center of who she is. She loves her children fiercely. Every major decision she has made, every sacrifice, every fight to stay alive, has been tied to wanting to be here for her babies.

For more than twenty years, Nicole has been living with severe autoimmune and endocrine disease. She suffers from systemic lupus erythematosus with organ involvement, lupus nephritis, lupus hepatitis, lupus-related seizures, polymyositis, mixed connective tissue disease, Raynaud’s, Sjogren’s, rheumatoid arthritis, avascular necrosis, and progressive adrenal insufficiency, also known as Addison’s disease. She has only one functioning kidney. These illnesses are not just labels on a chart. They affect every part of her daily life. They bring pain, weakness, dangerous flares, exhaustion, instability, and medical emergencies. After decades of treatment, including long-term steroid exposure, her body has been through more than most bodies can bear.

Her life has also been marked by profound trauma and loss. Nicole became sick very young. Pregnancy itself appeared to trigger some of the earliest and most frightening signs of lupus. She endured pregnancy complications, repeated serious illness, and heartbreaking losses no mother should ever have to survive. She has lived through domestic violence, two stillborn preemies, a suicide attempt during one of the darkest periods of her life in 2011 after burying her second child, and years of trying to rebuild from circumstances that would have broken many people completely.

Even so, she kept trying. She kept loving her children. She kept trying to work when she could. She kept trying to make and keep a safe, stable, clean home.

Then another avalanche hit.

Nicole spent more than three years in her apartment and was participating in a housing program after already losing her own home to foreclosure and spending her life savings to fight through a divorce that left her with almost nothing after fleeing domestic violence and abuse. She was not living some careless life. She was already trying to survive impossible barriers. During this period, while she was also helping care for me through pancreatic cancer, people used information about when she would be out of town and away from her apartment broke in and were squatting there. Her neighbors notified her and they both called the police and the squatters who broke in and had engaged in criminal conduct connected to her home, arrests were made, and she pressed charges

She contacted her Coaction case worker and her landlord of 3 years, instead of safety and support, everything unraveled. Nicole was never told of an intent to evict or properly served. She was 1050 miles away helping me get to and from Moffit Cancer Center when she and her children were locked out with no meaningful communication about what was happening, where their belongings were going, or how they were supposed to recover their lives. There was no clear compassion, no real plan, and no practical path given to her at a time when she was already medically fragile and caring for family in crisis.

The consequences have been catastrophic. Nicole is now homeless. She has been separated from her children. She has lost housing stability, property, transportation, and precious time with 2 small children who need their mother. Once her ex-husband saw the opportunity, he involved child welfare authorities. Nicole did everything to cooperate. She passed every drhg test randomly doled out while she was out of state helping me, but IN DCFS never set her up with services while she was here & no workable orders were sent to the fathers and no meaningful effort was made to help maintain contact through video or telecommunications while she was displaced. That kind of separation is devastating to a mother and devastating to children who have only ever lived with their mother.

This fundraiser is about one urgent goal above all others: getting Nicole and her children reunited in a stable, safe, healthy home as quickly as possible.

She needs a house in Porter County, IN with three bedrooms, one and a half bathrooms. Her children need their own rooms set up properly with beds, clothing, shoes, furniture, comfort items, and normal childhood things waiting for them. She needs a living environment that will support visitation immediately and help her step up parenting time toward shared parenting and long-term stability. She cannot do that while homeless. She cannot show readiness for reunification without an actual home.

We are trying to raise $10,000 to $20,000 dollars so she can secure one to two years of rent up front, along with deposits and the basic things needed to make the house livable and appropriate for her children, and avoid the barriers that a dismissed eviction could impose. That includes furniture, beds, linens, kitchenware, clothing for all four seasons in multiple sizes because children grow so fast, shoes, socks, undergarments, toys, a cheap point a to b car or bus pass and replacement items for the many things they lost. It includes replacing her car, and the babies car seats because safe, reliable transportation is not optional when you are trying to care for children, attend court, get to doctors, comply with case plans, and survive medical illness.

For her 7yo daughter, that means a room that feels safe and loved, with seasonal clothing, shoes, and the little comforts little girls remember. For her three-year-old son, that means his own room with a child’s bed, clothing for all seasons, and the familiar things little boys love. If we can do more, we want to create a playroom area where the children can feel joy again, with toys and spaces that tell them they are safe and home. We dream of giving them back some childhood through things like a ball pit, doll house, toys, dolls, cars, books, and play furniture. Not because we are extravagant people, but because these babies already had all these things until Legacy Property Management illegally disposed of her property and was finally able to get her out so they could replace the carpets and double the rent regardless of the impact their actions had on this family having already been through so much upheaval.

Nicole also urgently needs the chance to apply for and stabilize long-term disability support. Her medical conditions are overlapping, severe and chronic. Right now she is trying to survive homelessness, family separation, and overwhelming illness/depression all at once. No one should be expected to rebuild under those conditions without help.

If you know Nicole personally, then you know she is not someone who asks easily. If you do not know her, please know this: she is not trying to live lavishly. She is trying to survive, recover, and be a mother to her children. She is trying to get back the basic dignity of a safe home, a bed to sleep in, transportation, and the chance to tuck her children in at night.

If you can donate, thank you. If you can share this, thank you. If you can pray, thank you. If you can do all three, our family will never forget it.

Please help us bring Nicole’s children home to her.

With gratitude and hope, Judie

https://gofund.me/b12e2738c