Before there was an organization, there was a spare room. For ten years, a Long Island social worker named Pat Shea took homeless pregnant women into her own home, one at a time, because there was nowhere else on the Island built for them. In 1986 she stopped improvising and, with family and friends, opened a house in Wantagh where young mothers could live with their babies while they got on their feet. That house became MOMMAS House, and this fall the organization turns 40.

A program, not just a roof

Shea's path to that first house started far from Long Island. As a college student she spent months doing missionary work in Mexico, and came home changed by the poverty she saw there and what it did to children. As a social worker back in New York, she kept meeting young women facing the same cliff: pregnant, aging out of foster care, little education, nowhere to go. In 1970 she established the Nassau and Suffolk branch of Birthright, connecting women in crisis pregnancies to prenatal care and parenting resources. But she came to a blunt conclusion after a decade of sheltering women herself: a roof was not enough. What these mothers needed was a program, so she built one.

The model MOMMAS House settled on is still unusual. Mothers between 18 and 24, pregnant or parenting children up to age five, can stay for up to two years, not the weeks or months most emergency housing allows. The time is the point. Two years is long enough to finish a diploma, complete job training, learn to run a household and leave able to support a family, and the organization describes itself as the only transitional residential program on Long Island created specifically for young mothers and their babies.

Four decades, told in houses

The organization's history reads like a map of Long Island generosity. The first residence opened in Wantagh in 1986 in a rental property that businessman Joe Haley turned over to the fledgling program for four years. In 1989 the parish and village of Malverne refurbished an empty building at Our Lady of Lourdes into the program's next home. A former convent in Brookville, offered by St. Paul the Apostle, became the second house in 1994. Three years later, Glen Cove's mayor at the time, Tom Suozzi, asked the group to open in his city, and the former rectory of St. Rocco's Church became house number three.

The building never stopped. A HUD grant helped purchase a two-family home in East Massapequa in 2005, which now serves as permanent apartments for graduates of the group residences. The Brookville home moved in 2006 into a historic house from Jericho's original Quaker settlement. Hempstead got a group residence in 2007 with help from a Nassau County grant, then a second one in 2018, bought through a capital campaign and renovated by volunteers alongside Northwell Health and Rebuilding Together Long Island.

Today the organization operates group residences in Glen Cove, Jericho and Hempstead plus the permanent housing in East Massapequa, and counts more than 1,000 families who have come through its doors since that first Wantagh house.

Forty years on

The anniversary gets its formal celebration on November 5, when MOMMAS House holds its 40th anniversary gala at Westbury Manor. But the real measure of the milestone is quieter, and it is in the arithmetic: four decades, five residences, a thousand families, most of them mothers who arrived with a baby and little else and left with the tools to build a life.

For readers who want to be part of the next decade, the organization runs on donations and volunteers, and its site at mommashouse.org lists both. Forty years ago one social worker decided Long Island's youngest mothers deserved more than a shelter bed. The Island has been proving her right ever since.