Watch the woman who gives free monthly treatments to women in need
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A domestic abuse survivor, Vanessa Howard was homeless for nearly two years and moved from shelter to shelter with her three children.
The 48-year-old, from Tampa, Florida, who has now been running a salon Giving Hands Beauty Salon for three and a half years, gives free monthly treatments to homeless women, domestic abuse survivors and cancer patients.
She gives free hair treatments, facials, a makeover, manicures and even a catered lunch to seven women every month.
Vanessa told Barcroft TV: “I came up with the idea for doing a free session for the salon through a vision that God had given me to start giving back once a month to homeless women who were broken as I was.”
“I was homeless for almost two years and I had tried to commit suicide on several occasions. I became homeless through my children’s father. I had to leave that abusive relationship and so I left him, and that was the start of my homelessness.”
Vanessa’s daughters Sharde Brooks and Precious Stokes also help their mother at her salon.
98 percent of the homeless women who were given free beauty treatments at Giving Hands Beauty Salon have found jobs and homes.
Vanessa said: “Some of the women that come here is never being called beautiful before, so with just the affirmation of calling them beautiful and just, you know, welcoming them with loving arms the walls begin to come down.
“They just leave here just transforming from the inside out.”
She says that she greets the homeless women with warm hugs to make them feel comfortable because it’s a place that she came from.
She loves giving these women their confidence back. That’s all she wants by giving them free beauty treatments.
“I just get overjoyed to see when women gain their confidence, gain their self-esteem back and feel whole again”, she says.