Suzie Jackson (’15) Starts Housing Nonprofit for Steubenville’s Homeless

“Many homeless people fall through the cracks in the system, so I decided to do something about it,” says Suzie Jackson (’15), physician assistant and founder of Homeward Bound, a new nonprofit organization in Steubenville, Ohio, which will provide transitional housing and assistance to the city’s homeless community.

Miss Jackson always knew she wanted to help people, specifically as a physician assistant. “My mom was a PA in the ’80s for open-heart surgery, and I loved hearing all her crazy stories,” she says. After graduating from Thomas Aquinas College in 2015, she tried a career in business for a year, but decided it was not for her. “For me, I think a bad day in medicine would still be better than a good day in business,” she jokes. Returning to her love of the medical field and her mother’s stories, she attended James Madison University and received her physician assistant certification.

In 2023, Miss Jackson moved to Steubenville to begin work as an internal medicine PA at Trinity West Hospital, where she began treating patients, many of whom were from the city’s largely underserved poor and homeless community. Six months into the job, she saw a patient with a broken bone in her eye socket and no home where she could recover safely. “The patient fell through the cracks in the system,” Miss Jackson says. “I tried to find a place to discharge her to, but I couldn’t find anything available, and the hospital didn’t have the resources to place her somewhere quickly.”

Left with no other option, Miss Jackson ended up reserving a hotel room for the patient. As she drove to pay for the room, she had a moment of clarity. “Over the past six months, I had been seeing this very sick population with high rates of homelessness,” she recalls. “I realized the system was failing our local citizens. That’s when I had the idea to start a nonprofit that could provide these people with places to stay without having to activate the system, provide extensive documentation, or pay a rental fee.”

With this idea brewing in her mind, Miss Jackson traveled to Calcutta, India, a month later to volunteer with the Missionaries of Charity. She spent her days serving the Home of the Dying, meeting other volunteers, and spending time with Christ in Adoration. “I kept hearing the words ‘Serve my poor’ in adoration,” she says. “I asked Him to make me more organized and send people to help me, if He wanted me to start this organization.”

“We’ll pull these people out of their unhealthy existing networks, where there’s a lot of drug use, alcoholism, and abuse, and surround them with stable people and neighborhoods.”

Soon after she returned from India, she found help in the form of Dr. Joseph Almeida (’81), director of both the Great Books Honors and Legal Studies programs at Franciscan University and the father of one of Miss Jackson’s classmates at the College. “I had been trying to figure out how to start this thing on my own, and he helped me walk me through the logistics and legal steps of starting a nonprofit,” she says. After establishing a board of directors and filing the paperwork, Miss Jackson officially launched Homeward Bound on January 1, 2025.

“The vision for Homeward Bound is to provide low-barrier transitional housing to the homeless community here,” explains Miss Jackson. The nonprofit plans to buy inexpensive, rundown local houses, fix them up, and offer them to members of the homeless community. “We’ll also be working on a case-by-case basis to get those living in our housing back on their feet, helping them find and prepare for job interviews, offering rides to and from counseling, and integrating them into the local community,” she continues. “We’ll pull these people out of their unhealthy existing networks, where there’s a lot of drug use, alcoholism, and abuse, and surround them with stable people and neighborhoods.”

Currently, Homeward Bound is in its fundraising stage, as it prepares to buy and renovate its first home. “The cost of living here is quite low, so we’ll be moving forward with that soon,” Miss Jackson says. “Homelessness will never be ended in any place — Jesus told us that — but we hope to serve the poor and homeless very well here.”