June 18, 2026
Each morning, Christine Davies wakes up on the mattress she bought herself, safe and grateful to be alive. The mattress is a simple luxury that once seemed impossible – purchased with the help of matched savings from United Way’s Empower U program. But her story doesn’t start there. It starts in survival.
Christine grew up on an acreage with her mom and stepdad near South Cooking Lake, Alberta. Her mom was a heavy drinker due to her own intergenerational traumas and was often in bed sick. Christine’s stepdad worked hard to provide for the family, but he worked nights and was often asleep during the days. She spent a lot of time on her own and isolated from friends and community, making her own food and getting herself to school on the yellow bus.
When things at home became unsafe or chaotic, her grandparents who lived down the road took Christine in. Christine’s biological father also spent a lot of time with her over the summer, every other weekend and holidays which she considered an escape from her home life. Despite these supports, due to the alcoholism, she experienced different types of abuse and trauma throughout her childhood. At 14-years old, Christine ran away. It was her first trip into the city by herself after being sheltered and isolated outside of the city, and she was quickly introduced to substances. “Crystal meth took everything away: all my trauma and pain. Everything went really numb.” Her family quickly became those around her who were also unhoused and experienced similar traumas in their childhoods.
While her home life had offered long periods of neglect and trauma, she entered the city naïve to drugs and the lifestyle that came with them. An even more difficult world would soon fill her days. “Then, I had a real love-hate relationship with money,” says Christine. Money became a trap. When she had it, she was drawn into dangerous situations. When she didn’t, desperation led her to survival crime.
Little changed when she turned 18, but the risks and consequences grew bigger. Longer jail sentences, bans from the inner city, more violent romantic partners and harder drugs.
At 24, she was handed a seven-year federal sentence and recalls her grandmother begging the judge to be lenient with sentencing. But Christine told her lawyer, “I need to I go to jail for a long time, because if I don’t [my boyfriend’s] going to kill me or the drugs are going to kill me.”
In the federal institution, she found more supports than she’d encountered previously. One day on her way to the gym, she was invited to sit with 10 ribbon-skirted women around a big drum. Her mother was a residential school survivor and, up until then, Christine hadn’t had any connection to her Indigenous culture, but as she listened to the women drum and sing, “I felt this spiritual connection, this sense of belonging I had never felt before. It’s like something clicked, and I knew I needed to keep coming back.”
Christine was inspired to do the work required to heal from her past—so much of which, she realized, was rooted in intergenerational trauma. She stayed off of substances, got her high school equivalency credential and took the programs and supports to work through all the things she was hiding from. Eventually, she was interviewed and—due to all the work she’d done—was approved to move into the minimum-security Buffalo Sage Wellness House, a residential facility for federally sentenced, Indigenous female offenders. With more independence, she found a job at a local pizza restaurant where no one knew her past.
Despite being in her 20s, having a job, a bank account and paycheck was entirely new to her. “It’s so hard to explain what it’s like to come back into society after ten years of being institutionalized. I didn’t even know you needed a filter to make a pot of coffee, let alone how to ‘become an active member of society.’”
Christine’s experience revealed a systemic gap: incarceration provided structure and met basic needs but infantilized her, while release offered freedom but no transition support. “For me, it was a crucial point in my life to learn about finances outside of my parole officer controlling them – outside of having to do survival crime to get them.”
Ready to build a different future for herself, Christine enrolled in United Way’s Empower U, a financial empowerment program, delivered at Buffalo Sage by the Elizabeth Fry Society. For the first time, she learned to see money as a tool for building, not just surviving. Throughout the 10-week program, she discovered financial tools and resources that gave her a boost of confidence and set her up to build a better life.
Through one-on-one coaching and financial education, Christine learned how to manage money, discovered budgeting strategies and savings tools that had always seemed out of reach. And thanks to Empower U’s matched savings component, every dollar she saved was effectively doubled by the program. “I bought myself a really nice mattress for when I moved into my own place,” Christine remembers with pride.
Reflecting on the instructors at Empower U, she says, “It just takes one person who sees you and is willing to build you up. That’s what I get to do now with my staff.”
Today Christine is Director of Housing at NiGiNan Housing Ventures, an Indigenous-led, United Way funded partner agency housing those with complex needs. Her empathic care for clients as well as her own lived experience has brought her success in her work supervising five housing sites serving 250 people.
Now 12-years off of her drug of choice and married with a step-daughter and 11- and seven-year-old sons, Christine marvels at how much her life has changed.
She no longer wakes up in parkades or on concrete floors. She wakes up in a dream home that she owns, in a life she built – knowing that financial stability is possible, that dignity is not a luxury, and that one person’s belief in you can change everything.
