One More Thing to Be Grateful For: Announcing a New, Permanent Home for My Life My Choice

At My Life My Choice, community is always central to what we are most grateful for this time of year—our community of mentees, survivor leaders and allies, donors, partners, and everyone who makes our work possible and impactful. This year, we have one more thing to be grateful for, and without our community and its commitment to making the fight against the commercial sexual exploitation of children an urgent priority, it would not have been possible.

We are unbelievably excited to share that in early 2022, My Life My Choice will be moving into a new, permanent home in Boston’s Back Bay.

Having a place of community and connection that meets all of our growing space needs has been a dream of My Life My Choice for many years. For the past 12 years, My Life My Choice has had the privilege to work out of the Boston Public Health Commission’s Dee Kennedy Family Justice Center. While we have greatly appreciated the strong partnerships that we built there, as well as the reliable, welcoming workspace, our staff size and strategic goals have outgrown the space and its limitations.

My Life My Choice has grown from just three staff members in 2010 to 34 at the end of 2020, and our cornerstone Survivor Mentoring Program grew from serving 26 youth in 2010 to 265 in 2020—this is a 10-year increase of 823%.

With our staff and programs continuing to grow, the need for a larger space that better meets our needs and furthers our goal for creating a hub of survivor leadership became an urgent and strategic priority that needed to be addressed even in the midst of a pandemic.

The new location and buildout will allow for a permanent home that provides a larger space with improved technological capabilities, private offices and meeting rooms, a state of the art training room, and warm inviting community spaces for the young people we serve. The new site will also increase our capacity to serve more youth, help expand our network of well-trained service providers, increase access to the State House for expanded survivor-led advocacy, and create an office environment that reflects the size and needs of our growing team, while serving as a hub for our survivor-led services and survivor-centric community.

This next step in our growth trajectory would not have been possible without the incredible support of our donor community who has supported our programmatic growth and sustainability year after year. Further, in 2020, we received an anonymous donation through the Tides Foundation to help make a move and long-term lease a reality. We then worked to secure additional grant support, and are thrilled to share that we have been awarded two generous grants from the Richard and Susan Smith Family Foundation and the Fish Family Foundation to support the buildout of the space and the majority of the costs associated with furniture and technology. This incredible support is helping make our dream of a permanent home a reality.

Recently, our staff visited the site to see our future home and the progress being made fitting the space to meet our specific needs. The space has been gutted and there are beams in place where walls will be soon. It was amazing. We did not quite anticipate how moved everyone would be to actually be in our new home together. There were a fair amount of tears and quiet reflection on how far we have come as an organization. We brought Sharpies with us and wrote on the walls and the steel beams—messages that will be invisible reminders, hidden by sheetrock and new paint, that this place was built with love.

We are excited to bring you along on this journey with us, and will continue to share pictures of the progress along the way. We could not have made it to this milestone without the incredible support of our partners, donors, volunteers, and champions over the years—thank you! As always, we are grateful to you for being part of the My Life My Choice community—supporting our work every step of the way—to that day when no child is bought or sold.