Following the Path of a Successful Volunteer
Picture a young woman with five children whose drinking and incarcerations led her to lose custody of them. Nowhere to go but home to a toxic environment, she knew she needed help to get clean and sober and get her children back. Enter Hope’s Crossing, a Phoenix, Ariz., nonprofit organization founded by Laura Bulluck, a 2011 M.S. in Nonprofit Management and Leadership graduate. Within 18 months, that troubled woman was sober, employed, a peer mentor, and member of the board of directors at the same nonprofit organization that gave her hope and the tools to overcome life’s challenges.
“We helped her identify triggers that drove her to drink, and she started having more confidence in her ability to remain sober,” Bulluck says. “We worked with her to design a résumé, offered mock interviews, helped her obtain a job and connected her with a mentor. She recently received a promotion to a management role.”
As CEO and interim executive director of Hope’s Crossing, Bulluck has helped turn lives around. Her nonprofit offers programs and service to women who have experienced trauma and empowers them to be productive community members. Bulluck understands their circumstances: As a single mother of three children, she had faced domestic violence and had no other choice than to live in a shelter.
“I gained wisdom about how to navigate the process and helped other women through some of the same experiences,” she says. “I also began to volunteer and take on a mentor role with the women, and the social service bug bit me. I kept thinking about how I could do this full-time on a larger scale to help more women. I went to Walden to turn this dream into a reality.”
