Lotus House opens a one-stop hub for children and families. Here’s a sneak peek

On a once-neglected corner of Overtown, a five-story building now glows with bright art and the sounds of children.

Lotus House — already the nation’s largest women’s homeless shelter — has opened its newest expansion, the Children’s Village at Lotus Village, a 70,000-square-foot education and resource center designed to serve Lotus House families and the community.

READ MORE: Lotus Village’s founder: An idealist who has produced real world results. ‘I had to act’

The new Children’s Village is expected to serve more than 2,500 children a year.

The mission is sweeping: to deepen access to healthcare, therapy, legal services, early childhood education, after-school care and summer programming — and to do so in a way that acknowledges the racial and economic disparities that can shape life in Overtown.

“During the pandemic, Lotus House realized that we needed to expand to provide more services for our children,” said Executive Director Isabella Dell’Oca, who has worked for Lotus House for 11 years.

What began as a plan for a simple playground across the street evolved into a bold vision: 14 nonprofits operating independently but side-by-side in one building, bringing resources, education, healthcare and support into a neighborhood where half the residents lack internet access, infant mortality rates are among the highest in the county and 77% of renters spend more than 30% of their income on housing.

The goal, Dell’Oca said, is to “bring the best services available all under one roof … to serve not only the women and children who live at Lotus House but to expand those services to serve the whole Overtown community.”

A building filled with services

Inside the Children’s Village at 219 NE 14th Ter., Easter Seals South Florida runs a preschool for up to 80 children ages 3 to 5 who are low-income or have disabilities. The classrooms serve a neighborhood where 90% of students qualify for free or reduced lunch and high school test scores in math and reading fall to less than half the state average.

Urgent Inc. and Urgent Academy will be running a private middle school in the building as well.

Upstairs, you can walk through aisles of an expansive food pantry, passing staff and volunteers sorting hundreds of community donations.

“People come in our doors asking for food. … We made a video with Giselle [Bündchen] and Gloria [Estefan] that killed it on social media. And this is a result of the community really responding to our callout. So this is all community donations. All of it is community,” Dell’Oca said.

Dell’Oca said the expansion reflects a growing need: Once a month, Lotus House distributes essential goods to about 700 people. “So this is a dream come true for us,” she said.

Full list of nonprofits: Arts4Learning, Care4U, Children’s Bereavement Center, Easter Seals South Florida, Girl Power Rocks, Legal Services of Greater Miami, Lotus House Center for the Advancement of Children, Mindful Kids Miami, Nana’s Restart, Overtown Optimist Club, Overtown Children & Youth Coalition, The Alliance for LGBTQ Youth, United Way, Urgent Inc and Urgent Academy.

A national network, a local impact

Beyond food and essentials, the Children’s Village houses therapy rooms and offices for the Children’s Services Therapeutic Program — an effort shaped by lessons from the pandemic.

During the early months of COVID-19, Dell’Oca says they struggled to find guidance. That struggle led the team to cold-call shelters around the nation. Eventually, they built the National Women’s Shelter Network, now more than 500 members strong.

Through research partnerships and visits to hundreds of shelters, Lotus House refined an individualized, trauma-informed model.

“We serve women and children. … They have very high special needs, and they need a place where they could really focus on healing before they start working towards their goals,” Dell’Oca said. “Over 86% of our guests this year have successfully exited outside of the shelter system.”

This work is critical in a neighborhood where many families face trauma long before they arrive at Lotus House. Nearly half of the children they serve have developmental delays, health conditions or mental health needs, and 94% of women and children entering the shelter report trauma or abuse.

Inside the new therapy suite, Director of Children’s Services Muriel Ayala says the team can now offer a full range of gold-standard treatments — from parent–child interactive therapy to trauma-focused cognitive behavioral therapy — with dedicated spaces for assessment and follow-up.

The Overtown Optimist Club is preparing to expand its long-running after-school and athletics programs. The new space will allow the group to serve third- through eighth-graders here, offer robotics and arts programming, and eliminate major barriers for parents — including those living in or exiting Lotus House.

“So this building is breathtaking to me,” said Executive Director Ieshia Haynie.

With the added space, the club will soon offer dinner, homework help, enrichment classes and pickup from six local schools.

Labor of love

The Children’s Village is more than a building — it’s a long-term investment backed by an over $20 million capital campaign through the Lotus Endowment Fund Inc., and partnership with architects, engineers and community leaders who helped develop Lotus Village’s main campus. Construction for the Children’s Village began in April 2023, across the street from the Lotus House in Overtown, which opened in 2018.

“Its aim is to assure the long-term financial sustainability of Lotus House … and to provide for the capital needs of the shelter and now the Children’s Village,” said Lotus House founder Constance Collins.

Major contributors to the Children’s Village capital campaign include Citadel CEO Ken Griffin. The city of Miami contributed $1 million to the capital campaign.

The cost to build the Children’s Village came in at about $35 million, but about $3 million of that was free work from various contractors, engineers, architects and legal teams, Collins said.

“Honestly, it’s almost unheard of to have the level of generosity that we have had in these projects,” Collins said. “It takes a village to build a village.”