Community's Child Is Full of Grace

For 18 years, Tara Nierenhausen has given desperate young mothers a place to rebuild their lives and change their destinies. 

Written by Diane Krieger | Photographed by Wendy Saade 

Tara Nierenhausen was 22 when she found herself alone, with no place to live and caring for a newborn. Too proud to turn to her parents for help, she and her baby moved in with two single moms in similar circumstances. It worked beautifully.

“We supported each other while we worked and earned our college degrees,” she recalls. “We shared the rent, took turns cooking and babysitting. We were really happy.”

The three women lived like that for several years, becoming best friends. Their children—now in their 40s—feel as close as siblings.

That experience sowed the early seeds for Community’s Child, the Lomita-based nonprofit Nierenhausen founded in 2005. Today it’s a multifaceted program providing thousands of South Bay families with shelter, education, health and dental care, food pantries and community support programs.

But its original mission was to give vulnerable single moms a safe place to stay and a shot at a better future. Past residents have rebooted their lives, just as Nierenhausen did.

One of them, Esperanza Carmona, was the keynote speaker at the Lomita Mayor’s Prayer Breakfast last December. Thanks to Community’s Child, Carmona escaped generations of family ties to San Pedro gang life. She’s just completed her degree in social work, and her daughters are in college.

The Canadian-born Nierenhausen, 67, grew up in Coquitlam, a suburb of Vancouver. A daydreamer with average grades, she wasn’t considered “college material” and didn’t bother applying. A volunteer experience led to a job she loved: teaching life skills to developmentally disabled women.

A coworker urged Nierenhausen to go back to school, and she later graduated as valedictorian with a bachelor’s degree in special education. She managed several group homes for a few years before starting her own consulting business specializing in child protection issues related to parents with developmental disabilities. Nierenhausen worked in this space for 18 years, including as an expert witness in family court.

Then in 2001 she left Vancouver to start a new life in the South Bay. She’d met and fallen in love with a Redondo Beach engineer. They were married a year later, and Nierenhausen found work as program director with a crisis maternity shelter for pregnant, homeless and abused women based in Harbor City.

 The idea for Community’s Child crystalized in 2004. It came as a quasi-religious epiphany. She’d just dropped off a client and her baby with disabilities in the woman’s old neighborhood. Driving away, Nierenhausen found herself quietly weeping in her car. She knew the young mother was returning to a dysfunctional life—a job as a stripper in a drug-infested neighborhood with her abusive ex living nearby.

“She’d worked so hard to get away from all that,” Nierenhausen says. But crisis maternity shelters only provide short-term solutions—six months maximum—and this woman’s time was up.

Deeply frustrated, Nierenhausen believed more should be done. “As I cried, I heard the Lord say, ‘Well then, do something!’ That’s where Community’s Child was born,” she says.

Nierenhausen and her husband, along with five members of their church, raised $360,000—enough for a large down payment on “a rundown little parish house” owned by Calvary Assembly of God church in Lomita. They ripped it down to the studs and turned it into Building Hope, a six-bed transitional maternity shelter where residents can stay up to three years.

Since opening in 2008, Building Hope has welcomed 250 homeless women and their children. With 24-hour staffing and a house manager in residence, the shelter provides on-site services ranging from trauma counseling to cooking classes to resumé writing help. Past residents have gone on to careers as nurses, social workers, paralegals, medical assistants and business professionals. All have secured long-term housing; several are now homeowners. Most stay involved as active volunteers.

Nierenhausen soon expanded her nonprofit’s mission to provide outreach services for needy families associated with Calvary Assembly of God.

“They had all these classrooms that weren’t being used during weekdays,” she says of the neighboring church. Nierenhausen filled those rooms with parent education programs, ESL classes and employment counseling sessions eagerly attended by 120 parish families. She re-opened their food pantry. She started distributing backpacks with school supplies, new shoes and clothing, Thanksgiving meal kits and Christmas gifts.

“Our numbers grew to 1,200 families in a year and 12,000 when we left in 2015,” she says.

In 2016 Community’s Child opened its own outreach facility, the Hope Center, near Crenshaw Boulevard and 190th Street. The original food pantry served about 200 food-insecure schoolchildren, but demand exploded during the pandemic. At its peak, Hope Center fed 37,000 people and grew into a regional hub supporting other area food banks. It currently distributes 20,000 pounds of fresh produce a week.

Over the years, Community’s Child has received more than 100 community service awards. The nonprofit runs on a shoestring, with just six people on payroll and about 50 core volunteers.

“I’m tired,” Nierenhausen admits. “Running a nonprofit is exhausting. You wear so many hats—everything from public speaking to writing grants, cleaning toilets and fixing broken fixtures. It’s nonstop.”

She’s currently scouring commercial real estate listings. The Hope Center urgently needs to relocate, as traffic from a new Starbucks impedes food pantry access. She’s eyeing apartment properties too. A long-term goal is to offer rent-to-own housing options as an extension of the transitional shelter program.

In December, Nierenhausen took a rare break to visit her daughter, Amber, now 42, and three grandsons: Joey, 18, Matt, 16, and Evan, 14. They all still live in Coquitlam, her old stomping grounds.

But Redondo Beach is Nierenhausen’s hometown now. She’s passionate about the South Bay community.

“I love all the people,” she says. “The woman who bakes Christmas cookies with the kids. The people who donate baby stuff for our infant pantry. South Bay residents care about their neighbors. Community’s Child truly belongs to the community.”

Community’s Child and Torrance Memorial

In 2014 Community’s Child formed a partnership with Torrance Memorial Medical Center to address rising numbers of schoolchildren showing up in the ER. Close study revealed more than one-quarter of area schoolchildren had anemia. Community’s Child and Torrance Memorial responded with the Healthy Bags program, which identifies nutritionally at-risk children attending local schools and sends them home with a bag of nutrient-dense groceries every Friday. A year later, the rate of anemia in this population had dropped to 4%, according to Nierenhausen.

Community’s Child also started cohosting annual family health screenings at Torrance Memorial. The event delivers crucial services to about 300 disadvantaged kids and their families. Participants receive free physical examinations by Torrance Memorial clinicians, including heart and blood pressure checks, lab panels and BMI assessments. Other health care professionals perform free dental exams and oral X-rays, conduct vision screenings and administer mental health assessments. The daylong program includes lunch and information sessions on topics like heart health, drug and alcohol abuse, and good nutrition, plus resources for enrolling in government programs like WIC, SNAP and Covered California. Participating families have access to free follow-up services throughout the year. The 2024 screening will be held April 13 at Torrance Memorial’s Hoffman Health Conference Center.