You can tell she’s been asked the question a thousand times, but Jenessa Fillipi is more than happy to oblige.
“So where does your organization’s name come from anyway?”
She recites the song lyrics like they’re her phone number or her kids’ birthdays. It’s second nature at this point.
Down home, where they know you by name and treat you like family
Down home, a man’s good word and handshake are all you need
Folks know if they’re falling on hard times
They can fall back on
Those of us raised up down home
“I remember sitting there in our living room, and the name ‘Down Home’ came across my mind,” says Fillipi, the cofounder and CEO of Down Home, a Fargo-based nonprofit that helps stabilize and empower individuals and families emerging from homelessness. “I was thinking about the song from (the band) Alabama. And I grew up in the country and so did my husband. We’re from small-town communities, where people helped where needed and supported each other and knew each other by name. And so it just felt very fitting.”
Down Home, which was founded nearly a decade ago, primarily helps “transform four empty walls into a beautiful and dignified home” through donated furniture and decor. However, as the name suggests, it’s about so much more.
“The furniture is really an entry point,” Fillipi explains. “It’s an entry point for our clients but also an entry point for our volunteers and donors. We like to say it’s an opportunity to take a mission trip in your own backyard and an opportunity to really come face-to-face with some of the realities in our community.”
One of those realities is the fact that many families, especially those just getting back on their feet following some kind of crisis or trauma, are forced to forgo certain creature comforts such as furniture, beds, and home decor in order to pay for essentials such as rent, food, and transportation. This leads to parents sleeping on floors with young children, families using overturned plastic bins for dinner tables, and teens doing homework in dimly lit bedrooms.
For years, Fillipi and her husband saw the effects of these living situations up close and personal.
“My husband, who worked in building maintenance, would go into apartments and see a family living there for an extended period of time, and this is just their daily reality,” Fillipi recalls. “And then I would see the ripple effect on those kiddos in school, as an elementary counselor.”
So Fillipi began to get curious and started asking around — both the community agencies she worked with in her counselor role and area homeless shelters — about what kind of resources were available to local people emerging from homelessness.
“All of them confirmed that there was really nothing in the community that filled the void of helping completely transform (living spaces),” Fillipi says. “(My husband) and I had talked in the past about different for-profit ventures — flipping homes and utilizing our gifts and talents together — but it seemed like life just always got busy. In fall 2017, though, we entered into this quiet space that truly was the Holy Spirit, and I had the opportunity to look to my husband and say: ‘I think the Lord is calling us to something.’”
A few months later, the Filippis — Jenessa, Jake, their four kids, and Jenessa’s parents — partnered with Churches United in Moorhead to serve their first family a couple days before Christmas.
“It was at that time that we knew Down Home was meant to be for more than just our family,” Fillipi says. “It was meant to be a gift to our community.”
Since that first move-in, Down Home has served more than 250 families in the Fargo metro, providing not only home furnishings but also other services and opportunities, including birthday party packages, internet access, and connections to transportation, employment, and child-development services.
For a single mom like Melissa Bascom, who moved from New York City to Fargo in 2019, Down Home was the hand-up she needed to start a new life halfway across the country.
“Some nuns in New York gave her money to be able to even get here,” Fillipi says. “Melissa ended up at the YWCA and then was referred to Down Home. When we served her — you should see the footage because it was just incredible — she’s screaming! She just couldn’t believe that it would be so personalized. She’s like, ‘You heard me say I liked purple, and you put purple in my room!’”
As they try to do with all their clients — they remain in contact with more than 95 percent of those they work with at a year beyond the move-in date — Down Home stayed in touch with Bascom following that initial space-transformation, helping her secure permanent housing, a job, and empowerment training through the Jeremiah Program. Bascom has since earned a degree, written a book, and is part of this year’s United Way 35 Under 35 Leadership Program.
“I just really want people to see how our intentional and extensive work and follow-through with our clients is what builds that relationship and helps them connect and tap into other opportunities in our community,” says Fillipi. “It’s about stabilizing and equipping them and believing in them so that they can do more than they could even imagine.
“A common theme for many of the people we serve is an inability to recognize their own inherent worth and dignity. And so there’s this complete humility. We hear them say things like: ‘I didn’t know that I was worthy of this. I’ve never known what it’s been like to have my own bed.’ We hear children say, ‘Mom, I can finally have my friends over because I have my own bedroom put together!’ The world really can cloud our own vision of ourselves — as well as our vision of other people— and as soon as we, as human beings, start looking at someone and realize we might not know everything about them, what we see is that everyone has a story.”
As Down Home has added staff — they’re now a team of eight — it’s allowed them to not only serve more families each year but also look forward to even bigger and bolder dreams.
“Since the beginning of Down Home, we’ve talked about how Down Home is too good to just be in Fargo,” says Fillipi. “When we did our most recent strategic planning session in 2024, we began to discuss the possibility of expansion. We feel like we’ve really built the foundation, and now we’re at a stage where it’s really prompted us to do the behind-the-scenes work to build the systems of what we know works well and can be replicated somewhere else.”
Fillipi says that, alongside her board, the organization did a significant amount of due diligence as they asked themselves questions such as:
• How far are we looking?
• What would the regional impact be?
• What are some of the core components that Down Home would need in order to be successful somewhere else?
They then plugged their answers into a scorecard, as they assessed the fit in other regional metros, including Sioux Falls, South Dakota; Grand Forks; St. Cloud, Minnesota; and Bismarck.
“Bismarck came out ahead because of some of our initial relationships,” Fillipi says. “That was one of our components on the scorecard. And so now, as we look to our $10 million dream,’ this is where my excitement comes in because it feels a little bit like the beginning of Down Home again but in a different way. But we also have this clarity that we didn’t have in the beginning.”
As Down Home prepares for its next phase, fundraising has become a top priority. And with that comes the importance of having a successful Giving Hearts Day.
This year, the organization raised almost $240,000, nearly four times what they raised in 2020, their first year participating. So what’s their secret? There really isn’t one, explains Fillipi.
“There’s a line I like to use: We do our best, and let God do the rest,” Fillipi says. “We’re diligent in all the details, we put the work in, we attend the (Impact Foundation) training sessions, we show up, we cheerlead each other, we collaborate, we do all the things that DMF and Giving Hearts Day train us so well to do. And, of course, we build the relationships. And then, we get to show up that day and trust that, no matter how the numbers fall, the Lord’s got it.”
About Down Home
Down Home empowers lives and stabilizes those emerging from homelessness by furnishing homes, strengthening connections, and transforming communities. Through powerful partnerships with local agencies, donors, and volunteers throughout the FM area, Down Home transforms four empty walls into a beautiful and dignified home. Down Home is committed to continued empowerment, involvement, and stability in the community by staying connected with clients beyond the move-in transformation. Since 2017, Down Home has served more than 250 families, impacting more than 750 lives. Down Home is furnishings, decor, and so much more.
