All it took was forgetting to buy her son’s toiletries.
Prudence Wesson headed back inside the drugstore — 10 minutes tops — then drove home to her San Rafael apartment without a thought. Later, she recalled, “I reached back to get my purse, and it’s not there.”
Presuming it stolen from her back seat, Wesson, 55, panicked. It was a late July payday, and she’d just withdrawn that month’s rent, plus spending money, from an ATM. Suddenly it was gone. “I live paycheck to paycheck,” she told the Chronicle. She had no cushion, no family she could fall back on, and her partner, Marcel Parker, was also in a rough patch. All at once, she and her 17-year-old son Bailey were at risk of homelessness.
But she did have savvy honed from her decades of work, on and off, at the addiction recovery nonprofit Center Point. So she thought, “What would I do for someone in my situation?”
That’s how Wesson got connected with the Season of Sharing Fund, a donor-supported organization that provides emergency cash for food or shelter to residents of nine Bay Area counties. The charity supplied her with two months rent — enough to get her back on track — and it came through in just two weeks.
Jasmine Cervantes, Wesson’s case manager at Community Action Marin, which helped Wesson apply for Season of Sharing funding, praised her client’s resilience.
“In talking to her, I really got a sense of someone who has overcome a lot and just continues to do the best that they can day by day,” she said.
