Ruth House closes, leaving vacuum for women transitioning from prison, drugs
Holli Van Tassell looks at the view from the front porch of The Ruth House, after moving in on April 8, 2017. Van Tassell arrived at the Ruth House after a long string of what she describes as bad relationships around Utah, Nevada, Oregon and California. "Any red flags that I know now, before I just ignored them so that I didn't have to be alone," said Van Tassell. After two years, The Ruth House transitional housing for women was closed on June 30, 2018, due to a lack of funding.
On her last day at The Ruth House, Stephanie Bryant holds onto her necklace while looking out the front door and waiting for her ride. Bryant's necklace, which she fidgets with when nervous, features a small butterfly-shaped case containing her brother's ashes. Bryant was able to get off of meth once before, but began using again when her brother, Gary, died in her arms. After two years, The Ruth House transitional housing for women was closed June 30, 2018, due to a lack of funding.
Ruth House residents Tiffany Bills, left, and Stephanie Bryant, right, laugh in their kitchen with Tiffany Flygare who helps run the home on April 19, 2017. In addition to set classes and treatment programs, the Ruth House is designed to build an informal community for women trying to leave old social circles that may have been tied to substance use. After two years, The Ruth House was closed on June 30, 2018, due to a lack of funding.
OGDEN — A common saying among Christians is, “When God closes a door, he opens a window.”
But in this case, Kyle Hill sees God not just opening a window, but kicking down another couple of doors, Rambo-style.
“That’s exactly the conversation we had with the last graduating group from The Ruth House,” said Hill, who is executive pastor at The Genesis Project in Ogden and executive director of Golden Spike Outreach. “We told them, ‘We know God is closing this door, but he’s kicking open a set of double doors.’ “
Since 2016, Hill and his wife, Holly, had been operating The Ruth House as an inexpensive place for women to live while they transitioned from prison and drug use and began connecting with God. But at the end of June, the Hills were forced to close the home.
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The house was originally intended as an investment property — Hill is a real-estate agent — and he’d fully intended on selling the home for a profit. But when he told his wife of his plans, her answer wasn’t what he expected.
“Nope,” she told him. “I hear you come home every night so concerned about the women and men coming out of incarceration, and domestic violence, and drugs, with no place to go. Why don’t we do something about it?”
So they did. They converted the home into what was basically a four-bedroom, two-bathroom treatment home. And for the past two years they’ve been helping women get clean and sober and then “graduate” from The Ruth House.
The residence housed five women at a time, who paid $250 to $350 a month in exchange for a place to live and a “Christ-centered” recovery program. Residents were assigned chores around the house and were asked to volunteer at the Hills’ Hub City Coffee, at 3525 Grant Ave.
However, unable to secure grant money to continue funding the home, the Hills have now closed The Ruth House. Hill said other more-established organizations, like the YCC, were getting — “and rightfully so” — what little grant money was available for such programs.
“We graduated the last girl, and the house is sitting vacant now,” he said. “It’s one of the toughest decisions I’ve had to make in the 15 years I’ve been in the ministry.”
Hill said he and his wife weren’t able to attract enough volunteers to keep the housing program going. And then, of course, he says the finances continued to be a burden.
“My wife and I prayed heavily over the last couple of months, and we just felt we were beginning to reach a burnout point,” he said.
Hill figures that, after donations and other financial support, he and his wife were pouring $50,000 to $60,000 of their own money into keeping The Ruth House up and running.
“If somebody were to give us a house, we could staff it, but between the staffing and the housing it broke us financially,” he said. “We had to make the decision before it got really bad. We wanted to end The Ruth House on a high note, rather than bringing girls in and not doing them justice by serving them well.”
So the Hills shut it down and donated the furniture from the house to the graduating residents.
Tiffany Flygare, who was the outreach coordinator for The Genesis Project, was in charge of the day-to-day operations of The Ruth House. She called it “a safe place to get clean.”
Flygare will remain with The Genesis Project through the end of September, and on a limited basis will then be an assistant to Hill.
“She’ll still be active in keeping women out of prison, and she’s applied for jobs to places like Weber Human Services,” Hill said.
Over the two years, Hill said they helped 36 women get their lives back on track. And he says only two of the women relapsed back into drugs.
“That’s a pretty good success rate,” Hill said.
The couple have talked about selling the home, but Hill says they probably won’t for awhile. One of their first graduates is going through a difficult time right now, and the Hills are going to let her stay in the home free of charge while she “pulls things together.”
Hill said he’s painfully aware that the demand for such sober housing remains In Ogden. But eventually, he suspects they’ll have to get rid of the home.
“We are inevitably moving in that direction — to sell the house — unless God smacks me upside the head and provides new vision for the house,” he said. “And I’m very open to that.”
Hill thinks he and his wife trust that they’ll be inspired with a new vision at The Genesis Project. And he says he hopes to be better prepared with the next undertaking.
“We need to be more prepared than we were going into this Ruth House project,” Hill said. “This was a knee-jerk reaction to help one girl at the time. It was just one girl from California, and we wanted to help her pull her life together and invest in her — and we did that. And then another girl had a need, and another, and another. Then, once word got out, we had a waiting list of over 80 women.”
Contact Mark Saal at 801-625-4272, or msaal@standard.net. Follow him on Twitter at @Saalman. Friend him on Facebook at facebook.com/MarkSaal.