Women Get Second Chance

VIDEO – THE HEROINE’S JOURNEY –

May 16, 2024 – For Melissa Shelley, it all started at a coffee shop. She was in recovery from a drug addiction that crippled her life for 20 years.“The thing that took me the furthest was heroin, it started out with marijuana, I had experienced some sexual abuse as a young child … and so I didn’t know how to deal with it,”

She said she lost everything to drugs, her home, her family, but she said even after jail time and recovery centers, she was still at a loss.

“I had nothing to my name, no license, no car, no clothes, and so I had to completely rebuild my life. I had to restore my relationship with my children. I had to get a job, get my license, take care of probation, and my first instinct when I stepped out was like, ‘Holy crap, this is way too much. There’s no way I can do this,’” said Shelley.

That’s when she found faith and ‘The Coffee Hub,’ a small shop in Xenia, which gave her a job, her second chance.

In fact, she says many of the workers employed here are in addiction recovery, so she continued hers, started to manage the shop, and started something new.

Almost ten years clean and she now runs her own nonprofit, ‘The Hope Hub’ in Xenia, a place that helps women in recovery get back on their feet and have a place to stay while they’re doing it.