A nonprofit that employs a Housing First approach to homelessness in the Williamsburg, James City County and York County communities has received grants that will further its initiatives.
Established as a nonprofit in 2014, 3e Restoration Inc. was a grassroots effort born out of the work of Williamsburg Christian Church, a nondenominational church in James City County that has a long history of helping homeless people and the socially displaced.
The Rev. Fred Liggin is at the heart of both, serving as lead pastor of WCC and founder of 3e Restoration, where he is executive director of community development and training.
“3e was an attempt to be faithful to our Christian confession that the Christ has called the church to be indiscriminately faithful in hospitality and inclusion to the neighbors in our city living through social displacement,” Liggin said.
Social displacement, Liggin said, “is a broader category of houselessness.”
Fred Liggin
Some examples of social displacement include people living with developmental disabilities, people who are domestic survivors, people living with serious mental illness, substance use disorder, immigrants, refugees, older adults and widowers.
“Because people can live in a house and still feel like they don’t have a home,” he said.
At its core, 3e Restoration is a Christian community development agency that collaborates with other nonprofits, social services agencies, faith-based organizations and education institutions. It prioritizes housing and provides trauma-informed care to those who need it and trauma-responsive training.
The beginnings of 3e Restoration
Before it became incorporated as a nonprofit, the work of 3e Restoration to help homeless people was being done out of the WCC.
“We had housed 11 neighbors on our own dime,” Liggin said. “It was just faithfulness.”
The Housing First approach prioritizes immediate, permanent housing to individuals experiencing homelessness or insecure housing without preconditions such as employment or sobriety.
“Before anything else — before you get a treatment plan or before you get a job — we secure your housing first,” Liggin said. “This eliminates the primary traumagenic event that is malforming their nervous system and brain function. Then, once they are stabilized and their nervous system and brain start to regulate, then we address some of the root causes of displacement.”
Liggin’s early experiences with unhoused people led him to try to understand the how and why of it all. He also wanted to better serve his church.
“I saw people living through wounds, which that’s what the word ‘wound’ means — trauma,” said Liggin, a certified trauma professional. “I wanted to know how to be with them through those wounds.”
He has taken that knowledge and written a trauma-responsive framework and curriculum that guides 3e Restoration’s work, which is focused on “seeing the whole person, not just the problem that needs to be solved,” he said.
“It’s mutuality,” added Tammy Evans, founding executive director of 3e Restoration. “It’s about giving someone back their own power and dignity. We give them a voice, a choice, and provide them services.”
Evans met Liggin in 2012 while volunteering at WCC’s winter homeless shelter. Evans had never met a homeless person.
“I couldn’t tell who the homeless were and who the church members were,” she said. “They were all comingled.”
Not long after she began volunteering, Evans joined Liggin and helped get 3e Restoration formalized as a nonprofit. A former real estate agent and broker, Evans brought with her a wealth of information about housing as the pair worked on ways to partner with landlords and property owners to secure safe, immediate housing.
“I never set out to create a nonprofit or become an executive director,” Liggin said. “It was not done out of desire — it grew out of a church trying to be faithful to the city — it was created formally out of need.”
The Rev. Fred Liggin shares a message at Williamsburg Christian Church, where he is lead pastor. Courtesy of Fred Liggin
For the past 11 years, 3e Restoration has made great headway by leveraging already existing programs in James City, York County and Williamsburg and partnering with organizations, property and business owners to provide new services through a coordinated system of care.
3e Restoration also went through the extensive process to get Liggin’s trauma-responsive curriculum accredited by the International Accreditors for Continuing Education and Training. Grants have also played an important role.
Expanding initiatives
In July, 3e Restoration received a $50,000 grant from the Williamsburg Health Foundation to expand its Resilient Neighbor Initiative. This funding supports delivery of 3e Restoration’s trauma-responsive, evidence-based education and resources for local front-line human service professionals and nonprofit staff and volunteers. This training equips them to understand the widespread impact of trauma, recognize its signs and adapt to the needs of people who have suffered trauma and connect them with appropriate services.
“This grant was huge for us, because we wanted to provide free or reduced-cost courses that are accredited to certify the first responders in the community,” Liggin said. “For us, first responders don’t just include police and medical and personnel, but also human services, social services, non-governmental organization folks, case managers, clinicians.”
Also in July, 3e Restoration received an $85,000 grant from the Sentara Cares Foundation to support its Be the Change Hospitality project. The project is based at the Pineapple Inn and Housing Center in Williamsburg — hotel rooms serve as emergency shelters and guests receive immediate support, including access to a food pantry.
The grants come at a time when the community is seeing a rising number of homeless people. A recent study commissioned by Newport News found that 2,000 people on the Peninsula experience homelessness each year. It projected a 15% annual increase in calls for assistance over the next three years if trends continue.
In addition to that, a number of nonprofits that help the homeless community have been hit by federal cuts, including the Williamsburg House of Mercy, which had to cut its Housing Mission program earlier this year.
Nationally, the number of homeless people has also climbed. Nearly all homeless populations have reached record levels, according to a 2024 Annual Homelessness Assessment Report by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. Families with children saw the biggest increase.
“The current admin cuts have already affected agencies who work in the space of homelessness and poverty alleviation, and it greatly concerns us because our communities will be directly hit by it, and we will all have to work more diligently to create initiatives and collaborations to meet those needs in our localities,” Liggin said.
Williamsburg has already taken steps to address rising numbers of unhoused individuals. The city recently announced a pilot project called Houseless Outreach Partnership Engagement, or HOPE. Comprised of an outreach coordinator from the city’s Department of Human Services and a mental health clinician from Colonial Behavioral Health, the HOPE team will focus on building rapport and trust with unhoused people and connecting them to essential services and secure permanent housing.
Liggin, who has provided trauma-responsive training to the city, called the pilot project “innovative.”
“This is an initiative to genuinely help our unhoused neighbors find housing,” he said.
Looking to the future, Evans said one of 3e Restoration’s ultimate goals is to move its trauma-responsive training program online and expand its reach throughout the state.
While Liggin continues to educate others on Housing First and trauma-responsive philosophies, he said he’s looking forward to continuing his mission of community development and urges others to be compassionate and hospitable to those less fortunate.
“So many homeless are living in ‘survival brain,’ and it’s hard to move from survivor to thriver,” Liggin said. “As Martin Luther King Jr. said, ‘It’s all right to tell a man to lift himself by his own bootstraps, but it is a cruel jest to say to a bootless man that he ought to lift himself by his own bootstraps.’”
To learn more about 3e Restoration, visit 3erestoration.org.
Amy McCluskey, amccluskey79@gmail.com
https://www.pilotonline.com/2025/09/13/williamsburg-area-nonprofit-works-to-fight-homelessness/
