September 24, 2025- The Lab Report Dallas- by Sharon Grigsby
Anastasia Nixon shows up to work each day to help a growing number of North Texas families who have no place else to go.
Anastasia Nixon’s body tells her the time. At 3 p.m. she feels the tension building as she listens to this mother’s desperate story. Anastasia is careful not to rush her client, adept at hiding the work-induced tightness as it climbs from her shoulders and up her neck. But it will be the afternoon’s last interview. The other families stuck at the front door of their journeys out of homelessness will have to wait until tomorrow.
On a good day, Anastasia’s been awake only since her alarm sounded at 5:30 a.m. More likely, she’s been up since 4, filling out paperwork to ensure families seeking shelter get the resources she has promised them.
“These days can be really heavy,” Anastasia says. “I won’t let myself extend past a certain time because I know that after that I won’t have the same level of zeal.”
She meets with homeless families in a bare-bones motel next to a busy freeway east of downtown. They show up daily at Anastasia’s makeshift desk near a second-floor breezeway and beg her for help. Some of them also arrive with accusations that Family Gateway, the unique shelter and homeless-services operation where Anastasia has worked for 17 years, has let them down.
A pregnant mother with three young children, weeks away from giving birth to her fourth, is hardly through the door before she erupts: “Why did you lie to us? Why did y’all put us here when you said you would keep us safe?”
“Let’s see what we can do to make things better,” Anastasia responds. She settles the children on the bed with Little Debbie glazed donut sticks, pouches of fruit punch, and the TV remote, then sits across the table from their mother and listens.
The family’s last real home was in suburban Denton County, where they were evicted after Mom lost her job. She felt their only option was to move in with a bad-tempered man. Things got ugly fast; their next stop was a domestic violence shelter.
As time ran out there, the mother connected with Family Gateway. A caseworker promised safety at its Far North Dallas shelter, but the family was instead placed in one of the nonprofit’s “overflow” motel rooms with no information about their future. On a trip to a nearby Walmart, the mother spotted several of her abuser’s acquaintances. She bolted back to the room and remained locked inside with her kids until Anastasia arrived
The terrified woman resumes her angry questions: “Where is the shelter? When can the kids go to school? Why did y’all lie?” Anastasia takes responsibility: “I want to apologize for everything that’s happened. That’s why I’m here. To find these gaps and fix them.”
She studies shelter lists on her laptop, makes a call, then explains what will happen next. The Family Gateway van will arrive tomorrow to take the family to a location far from the abuser. It’s still temporary, but the mom immediately will get help enrolling the children in school. Anastasia will make sure a caseworker starts looking at long-term housing options.
“What else do you need?” she asks, then makes a note that the woman requested a gift card for a child who has no shoes that fit. As the mother herds the kids out the door, Anastasia ignores the pain in her neck and gives each of them a hug.
Anastasia says it’s understandable the woman felt lied to. A Family Gateway caseworker promised a spot in the main shelter, but the staffer didn’t have the authority or even the knowledge to make that commitment.
Failures like this one are why 42-year-old Anastasia, who became Family Gateway’s first chief program officer a few months ago, is spending the week in this two-story orange and gold building just a metal wall away from one of Dallas’ most congested freeways. She’ll make similar visits to three other motels across the city that house additional clients.
When Ellen Magnis became Family Gateway’s president and CEO almost 10 years ago, one of the first things she figured out was she needed Anastasia at her side when dealing with the shelter’s most difficult cases. Ellen relies on Anastasia’s ability to forego judgment of any family and on her stellar skills at de-escalating situations. “She truly hears them while also holding them accountable to own their futures,” Ellen says.
Anastasia is now the person Ellen relies on to fix Family Gateway’s increasingly stretched support system for the fast-growing number of families the nonprofit is placing into “overflow” emergency housing. The demand has grown beyond what the nonprofit can provide in its own buildings.
Renting rooms and providing resources in modest motels worked well when Family Gateway needed housing for only five or six families. But this summer that number exploded to 50 or more families at any given time—the same number housed in its shelter—and the families’ needs are outpacing the assessment and diversion team’s best efforts to find solutions. This reflects national data; the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development last year reported that the number of families experiencing homelessness increased 39 percent from 2023, more than any other population category.
With federal pandemic-era funding gone and the economy uncertain, “it’s an intense and overwhelming time,” Ellen says. “Our worry, of course, is that this gets worse as we start talking about limitations on vouchers and work requirements on SNAP and Medicaid benefits.”
Family Gateway operates the only shelter in Dallas and Collin counties that serves all types of families and keeps all members together in one location. This is a segment of homelessness invisible to most of us, women and men for whom one bit of bad luck has left their children without homes. Those helped include single parents with kids, married and unmarried couples with kids, grandparents raising their children’s kids, families with older children, multi-generational families, and large families with complex backgrounds.
When Ellen took charge in 2016, the agency served about 400 families annually. By 2024, that number had increased to 2,100 families. Of that total, 460 stayed in the Family Gateway shelter, 174 went into its housing programs, 1,800 received diversion services, and about 500 needed a short hotel stay while awaiting shelter, diversion help, or long-term housing. (This breakdown includes some families who were helped in multiple categories.)
As the number of families in the overflow rooms grew, Family Gateway confronted a new problem. “We honestly patted ourselves on the back for getting families out of living in their cars or worse,” Ellen says. “Then we realized we are falling far short of needs.”
Instead of the easy response—excuses about “we’re doing the best we can”—Ellen, Anastasia, and others on the Family Gateway team have vowed to overhaul this part of its operation so families feel heard and supported. “It’s up to us to figure out how to scale those services,” Ellen says.
That’s why Anastasia spent much of August meeting individually with all the families placed in motels and continues to follow up to devise their next steps. She shares details of each of the cases with members of the assessment and diversion team to teach them to be more creative problem-solvers, all while juggling resources and rearranging options within Family Gateway.
On her second morning at the motel, Anastasia is still ferrying snacks and children’s craft supplies up the stairs when the first families arrive. She stops to call an Uber to get one set of parents to the local Workforce Solutions office. She talks to a suburban school district on a mother’s phone. Then she checks with Family Gateway on progress securing a child’s Social Security card.
In the first 30 minutes of the day’s initial interview, six moms—all but one with young children in their arms or clasped tightly by their hand—interrupt to ask for appointments. “You won’t forget me, will you?” one of the mothers says despite Anastasia’s assurances that she’s on her list for today. Eventually, Anastasia no longer tries to add room numbers to her tally and instead writes them on her left palm.
The families who wind up in the overflow rooms require careful assessment to determine whether they need shelter space or can be helped in another way. The nonprofit pays one family’s way to Memphis where relatives are willing to help. For another, it writes a check for the extra months required for an apartment deposit because the family has an eviction on its records. A third family has a housing voucher, and Anastasia finds a landlord willing to take it. In some cases, she determines the adults just need a motel room for their kids while they sort out their options.
The adults have had no one to talk to for a long time and they tell lengthy, convoluted, and devastating stories. About the daughter who misplaced the rent money. The single mom who couldn’t get to work after her car broke down; a friend loaned her one and it quit running, too. The family member who invited them to share living quarters then decided the kids were too loud. The unexpected out-of-state funeral during which a family was robbed of its small nest egg.
These families, who’ve bounced around from place to place and been on the receiving end of countless broken promises, are slow to trust. For those who get a spot in Family Gateway’s shelter, they gain a routine. Their children are enrolled in school or child care, and a chat with caseworkers turns to concrete next steps for permanent housing.
But Anastasia acknowledges the overflow setup carries an implied message of, “we don’t have room for you, so we’re going to put you here.” That’s why what’s most important, although also most difficult, is “really listening, then listening some more,” Anastasia says.
She learned early on in her shelter work that clients expect judgment, so her goal is to set a tone that what brought them here does not matter to her. “Really, I don’t care about anything that the parent might think is shameful,” she says. “This is what we’re dealing with. Now, let’s go forward.”
Anastasia’s ability to wade through each family’s chaos and despair to help find that first bit of light doesn’t come out of first-hand experience. She was raised in a stable, supportive family in small-town East Texas and never encountered a homeless person before taking a job with Family Gateway.
“It always shocks me how nonjudgmental and perceptive she is, despite her very different life story,” Ellen says. “She is our agency’s most unsung hero.”
Anastasia’s mom is a nurse; her dad, now retired, was the first Black state trooper in Bowie County, about 150 miles east of Dallas. Anastasia, the second of six children and a utility player on her high school and college softball teams, was initially interested in a career as a computer science engineer. “I didn’t want to do anything with people,” she says. “I’m an introvert.”
God saw things differently. Raised in a family that never missed a service at St. Paul Missionary Baptist Church in Texarkana, Anastasia switched career plans after college and began working with economically disadvantaged kids in Tyler. “When God calls you to something,” she says, “you walk in alignment with that.”
Anastasia credits her Christian faith, her mother’s immeasurable patience, and her father’s structure and accountability for how she navigates her job. She recalls the time when, as a teenager, she called her dad to tell him she had a flat tire. He arrived with an umbrella and the reminder that he had taught her how to repair a flat.
“I’m just here to hold the umbrella for you,” he told her. “You’re gonna change the tire.” Anastasia says that’s one of many times her parents “held the umbrella,” and she uses the same approach with Family Gateway’s clients.
Looking for a better salary to help her pay off her college loans, Anastasia moved to Dallas when she was 25 to become Family Gateway’s only case manager. Already uncertain whether she was qualified, she was shocked by the long line of people sleeping on the sidewalk outside the nonprofit’s shelter. On her first day, she encountered a supervisor asking questions she had no clue how to answer.
Anastasia wanted to drive back to Tyler as fast as possible, but “God said to me, ‘you can’t press rewind. I’ve called you just to be the person to work with these families.’” She found a mentor and made connections throughout the community. She got up to speed on “things I had never heard of in my entire life,” like federal benefits, subsidized housing, and child support.
After three years as shelter case manager, Anastasia worked another three in Family Gateway’s permanent supportive housing operation. She then returned to the shelter, at the time located downtown, as education director for children living there.
Once Ellen arrived, among her first decisions was to offer Anastasia the shelter director’s job. “I had to drag her, kicking and screaming, into that position,” Ellen recalls.
Observing several days of Anastasia’s conversations with families, one of the patterns that emerges is the power that builds in her frequent pauses. She almost always knows the best way forward for a family, but she lays out options and gives them the win of figuring it out for themselves. Sometimes she is trying to make space for a parent to talk—or to cry.
The final mom Anastasia greets on this Thursday in August arrives with five children, all younger than 10. After the mother’s husband went to jail in November, she tried to stay ahead of eviction with a job in the cafeteria of her children’s small-town school district. The money ran out in May, so she and the kids moved in with her mother-in-law, an arrangement that lasted only until the older woman wanted her privacy back. A nearby church paid for three nights of lodging and provided Family Gateway’s contact info.
The mother tells the story without emotion as My Little Pony plays on the TV and Anastasia holds the woman’s two-year-old as he traces her hand with a colored pencil. When Anastasia asks about the way forward, the woman will say no more than, “I just need to find a job and we’ll be fine.”
“What will you do about child care?” Anastasia asks. “I can feel your stress.”
Seconds go by. Finally, the woman begins to weep, a turning point in acknowledging her problems aren’t limited to finding a better-paying job. The two women now talk about the chaos of trying to manage five young children with no housing. The anxiety of knowing the older kids need to be in school. The lack of any type of support system.
Together they decide the best next step is to settle the family in one of the two shelter spaces Family Gateway keeps open for emergency situations and, once child care is established, get the mother into counseling. “She had to cry before we could move forward,” Anastasia says after the family left the room. “She was holding on so tightly she could hardly breathe.”
The last session stretches well beyond Anastasia’s 3 p.m. cutoff. She kneads the muscles nearest her neck as she acknowledges that helping clients recognize their feelings takes a toll on her own emotional state. As she does every workday, she’ll now try to set aside her clients’ needs; it’s time to pick up her young son for their daily trip to the pasture where their horse, Meadow, lives.
Anastasia took a job in the big city but she still finds her peace in the country, even if the tranquility is fleeting. “I struggle every single day to turn off Family Gateway and focus just on my kid,” she says.
It’s difficult to forget the families waiting in that orange and gold motel, and others like it across the city, whose cases she hadn’t even begun. Anastasia washes their room numbers off her palm at day’s end, but she knows they will find her tomorrow.
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