What we offer
Everything here starts with one conversation. You do not have to know which program you need, or explain yourself well, or have it figured out first. You come in, you say what is happening, and someone helps you see the shape of it.
The Center is in its founding year. The circles, workshops and schedules below are our program model — some are running, some are being scheduled now. Ask us what is meeting this month, and we will tell you plainly. In the meantime, the Find Help tool works today and connects you to services that are open right now.
Peer support
Facilitated, non-judgmental spaces where women can be honest, seen and strengthened. This is not a top-down model. It is a circle.
For women rebuilding after a marriage ends — the legal and financial pieces, and the harder question of who you are now that the role is gone.
For women caring for a parent while siblings do less. Guilt, resentment, logistics, and how to say no to family without rupture.
For mothers, wives and daughters holding a family together around someone's illness — including the part where you are exhausted and cannot say so.
The house is quiet and everyone says you should be enjoying it. For women rebuilding a life that was organized around other people for twenty years.
For women who are not in crisis but know something has to change, and want company while they work out what.
For mothers whose adult children see the world differently — new language around identity, gender and neurodiversity — and who want to stay close across the difference.
For women who moved here for a job, a marriage, a parent or a fresh start, and have not yet found their people.
For women who are surrounded by people and still profoundly alone. The one nobody wants to admit they need, and the one that fills first.
For women reconsidering, leaving, returning to or rebuilding a faith. No doctrine, no recruitment, no correct answer.
Group work is not for everyone, and it is not a substitute for clinical care. If you need a therapist, our navigators will help you find one who fits. If you are in crisis tonight: call or text 988, or FrontLine Service at 216-623-6888, both answered around the clock.
Work and money
Comeback coaching for reentry or pivot, plus practical tech confidence — without anyone making you feel behind.
Many women stepped back for a family and now want back in — with a résumé that has a gap, a network that went quiet, and tools that changed while they were gone. They earn too much to qualify for most workforce programs and have too little current practice to self-launch. That gap is the whole point of this program.
Name what you bring, build your 30-second story (cocktail and elevator versions), build and check your résumé, and get the networking scripts — free, private, printable. Facilitators: three PowerPoint workshops are at the bottom of it.
Open the Career Toolkit →Reentry, pivot or passion-building. We start with what you are actually good at — including the unpaid work, which is real work — and build outward into what is hiring in this region.
Including the part everyone dreads: how to describe a five-year gap in one confident sentence and move on. You are not apologizing for it.
Zoom, LinkedIn, Canva and AI tools like ChatGPT — taught slowly, repeated as often as you need, with no one sighing. Bring your own laptop or use ours.
Understanding social media and how your children and grandchildren actually communicate, so the distance is not technological on top of everything else.
Mock interviews with real feedback, including how to handle the question about why you left and what you have been doing since.
Accounts, passwords, photographs and what happens to all of it. Practical, not morbid — and a gift to whoever comes after you.
Open a board, run one search, and switch on the email alert before you close the tab. The alert is the part most people skip and it is the part that works.
See job listings on Indeed → OhioMeansJobs →
Cuyahoga County has real workforce infrastructure that most people never use. We do not duplicate it — we walk you to it.
Free one-on-one appointments with professional career counselors through Cuyahoga County Public Library. Call 216-475-2225.
The county's full-service job center at 1975 East 61st Street, free to any adult. 216-777-8200, weekdays 8:00–4:30.
Short-term credentials and workforce training built for adults returning to work or starting over later in life.
Body and nervous system
Restorative movement, breathwork, somatic healing, guided expressive writing, and reflection days.
Long stress lives in the body. Women carrying caregiving, divorce or years of holding it together often arrive braced — shallow breath, tight jaw, no idea what rest feels like. These programs are not a spa. They are practical work on a nervous system that has been on alert too long.
Gentle, adaptive classes for every age and body — chair yoga, yin, and body-awareness work designed to release stored tension and rebuild trust in your own body.
No experience needed. Nobody is looking at you. Nobody is bending further than you.
Grounding techniques for stress, overwhelm and grief. Formats run from thirty-minute drop-ins to six-week themed series, using neuroscience-backed strategies for regulating emotion.
Best for: the 3 a.m. spiral, and the hour before a hard conversation.
Single-day and multi-week workshops using writing to process change, grief, joy and purpose. Prompts are provided; nothing is read aloud unless you want it to be.
Finished pieces may be published anonymously in our community anthology, entirely at your choice.
Seasonal full-day retreats — Fall Reflection, Spring Reset — combining wellness, writing and quiet time, plus shorter reflection days through the year.
A whole day where nobody needs anything from you.
Two small private rooms with mats, soft light and essential oils are open during Center hours for breathwork, prayer, meditation, or simply sitting down when the day has gotten away from you. You do not have to book, explain, or be doing a program.
These programs complement clinical care; they do not replace it. If you are in crisis, call or text 988, or FrontLine Service at 216-623-6888.
Structured and practical
Facilitator-led sessions of ten to twenty women. Trauma-informed, interactive, and every one sends you home with something you can actually use.
Rediscover purpose. Design what is next.
An introspective and action-oriented workshop for the transition points nobody marks — post-divorce, post-parenting, post-career. You build a vision map, explore new roles, and define a life on your own terms rather than the ones you inherited.
You work through: identity shifts after a role ends · a life blueprint built on values rather than obligations · vision-mapping, journaling and strengths assessment.
Support for women navigating eldercare.
The emotional and logistical reality of caring for aging parents — managing family dynamics, communicating across generations, and understanding the systems nobody teaches you until you are already inside them.
You work through: Medicare and long-term care · Power of Attorney and legal basics · senior living transitions · boundaries with siblings who are not helping · the guilt, which is normal and not evidence of anything.
Secure your future. Understand your rights.
Led by a certified financial planner and a divorce coach, this walks you through the financial life you now have to run alone — in a room where not knowing is the assumption, not the embarrassment.
You work through: budgeting on one income · asset division · alimony and QDROs · retirement resets · updating insurance and beneficiaries · estate planning basics.
Because you care for others — but need care too.
A hybrid workshop and support group for women supporting parents, partners or children with complex needs. It names the parts that go unnamed: identity loss, compassion fatigue, and the invisible labor nobody counts.
You work through: guided journaling · restorative movement · resource sharing · protected quiet time that is yours.
Say no without guilt. Say yes with purpose.
A practical, empowering session on protecting your time, energy and emotional wellbeing — especially inside families, where the cost of saying no feels highest.
You work through: the "compassionate no" framework · values-based limits · role-playing the actual difficult conversations with partners, adult children and parents.
The part people underestimate
Healing does not only happen in circles. It happens in laughter, movement and shared experience.
Many women arrive here having lost the ordinary social life that used to come attached to a marriage, a workplace or a school community. Not therapy — just somewhere to go on a Thursday. That is a real need, and we treat it as one.
Art museum visits, wine tastings, yoga in the park, guided hikes, theater nights. Come alone — most people do.
Monthly conversations on reinvention, womanhood, caregiving, leadership and aging, with authors, therapists and thought leaders.
Themed evenings — "Things I Never Said," "The Year I Let Go." Tell one or just listen. Both count.
A monthly, low-stakes way to meet people without committing to anything.
Potlucks, themed dinners and storytelling nights where nobody performs being fine.
Younger and older women matched for wisdom-sharing that runs in both directions.
We volunteer together — food banks, shelters, and drives for single mothers and elderly women. Doing something useful with other people is its own medicine.
Fall Reflection and Spring Reset — a full day of wellness, writing and company.
A soft landing. Walking into a room where everyone knows each other is hard; this is the room where they do not yet.
Volunteering is one of the fastest routes out of isolation, and you do not need a long commitment. Find volunteer options near you →
Free, and not ours
This is the most underused resource in Cuyahoga County. It is free, it is already paid for by your taxes, and most of what is below has nothing to do with books.
Cuyahoga County Public Library serves the suburbs — 27 branches across 47 communities. Cleveland Public Library serves the city — Main Library downtown plus 27 branches. Both cards are free. If you live in Cleveland, you can generally use both; ask at either desk.
Professional career counselors will sit down with you to build a job-search strategy, research companies and careers, rewrite your résumé and cover letter, prepare you for interviews, and plan a longer arc. This is a real counselor, not a pamphlet.
Call 216-475-2225 to book. Free.
Free group workshops on résumés, LinkedIn profiles, mock interviews and job-search technique — useful if a one-on-one feels like too much to start with.
Cleveland Public Library cardholders get free access to online training and certification courses — usable from home, not only in the building. Business, technology, design and software skills at no cost.
Branches connect you to social services and help you work out what you actually qualify for — plus food assistance through a partnership with the Greater Cleveland Food Bank. You do not need an appointment to ask.
Free classes for adults finishing a high school equivalency, learning English, or rebuilding basic skills. Call 833-ASPIRE2 (833-277-4732) — answered around the clock — to set a schedule that fits your life.
On-site homework help for K–8 students, running since 2002, plus free online tutoring through Tutor.com for all students and families. If you are raising a grandchild, this one is for you.
Free access to equipment most people would never buy — design software, cutting and crafting machines, and more. Good for a small business idea or a creative restart.
Apply for a passport at the branch rather than making a separate trip downtown.
Homebound delivery for people who cannot get to a branch. Worth knowing for a parent who no longer drives.
Printing, copying, scanning, public computers and internet. If your household is between internet plans, this is the bridge.
Quiet, free rooms you can book — for a job interview by video, a difficult phone call, or a group that needs somewhere neutral to meet.
Cleveland Public Library branches have dedicated phone lines for reaching a United Way 211 Navigation Specialist — a real person, from inside the building.
Both systems run free classes, author talks, book clubs and workshops all year. Check the calendar before you pay for something similar.
Cuyahoga County Public Library branches do not offer notary services — a common assumption worth correcting before you make the trip. Banks, and many city halls, generally will.
27 branches, 47 communities. Career appointments 216-475-2225 · Adult education 833-277-4732.
Main Library plus 27 branches across the city, with free online training and certification for cardholders.
Do it yourself, at 11pm, in your own kitchen
Six short tracks. Each one takes the situation you are actually in and walks you through it step by step, with a real link at every stage — in the order that gets you the fastest result. No account, no cost, no waiting for an appointment.
That is the normal place to get stuck, and it is exactly what a navigator is for. Bring the track and the step you stopped at — it makes the conversation much faster. Or build your own plan first →
Ready-made, free, and yours to use
Federal agencies publish complete teaching kits — instructor guides, participant workbooks, PowerPoint decks, videos and printable handouts. Because they are US government works they are generally free of copyright and explicitly meant for organizations like ours to use with the people we serve. This is months of curriculum development we can simply skip.
FDIC states plainly that Money Smart products are “free, non-biased, and not copyrighted.” CFPB offers its toolkit at no cost specifically to organizations integrating financial empowerment into client work. FTC materials are made to be shared and reprinted. Always check each site's own terms before rebranding or reselling anything — free to use is not the same as free to put our logo on.
A full instructor-led curriculum. Every module ships with an Instructor Guide, a Participant Guide and a PowerPoint deck. Teach the whole thing or pull single topics — banking basics, credit, borrowing, saving, protecting your money. Available in English, Spanish, Chinese, Korean, Vietnamese, Russian and Hmong.
Built for exactly our model: a toolkit for staff and volunteers who help people one to one. Modules on goals, saving, income and spending, cash-flow budgeting, debt, financial services and consumer rights — plus an implementation guide and training slides with trainer notes for preparing navigators.
Free booklets, fact sheets, infographics and multimedia on caregiving and dementia. The Caregiver's Handbook is a complete guide you can hand a woman at the end of a session. Order print copies free, or download PDFs. Spanish available.
Practical guidance for families living with dementia: daily care, behavior changes, safety, and looking after yourself. Good handout material for the circle, and good preparation for a facilitator who has not lived it.
Order printed booklets and fact sheets on scams, credit, debt and privacy in bulk, at no cost and with free shipping, and put them on the resource cart at the front desk. Made to be shared and reprinted.
Short consumer-education videos on avoiding, reporting and recovering from scams. Play one at the start of a session, or drop it into a Facebook Live as a conversation starter.
A joint FDIC and CFPB module built specifically around preventing elder financial exploitation — instructor guide, participant handouts and slides.
Official plain-language guidance and printable publications. Pair it with a call to OSHIIP (800-686-1578) for free one-to-one counselling.
The federal service for finding local aging help anywhere in the country — useful when a woman's parent lives outside Ohio.
The libraries above are linked rather than embedded on purpose. Embedding needs an exact video address, and a guessed one plays the wrong thing — or nothing — in front of a room of women. Send any specific video you want on this site and it can be embedded properly. The same goes for a PowerPoint you would like offered as a download.
That is the normal way to arrive. Start with navigation and we will work it out together — or start with the free directory and see what is out there.
Find help where you live Our values