After losing everything, Shirley Raines started a now-acclaimed non-profit organization committed to providing essential services to homeless populations.
Shirley Raines — founder of Beauty 2 The Streetz, a non-profit organization that provides food, clothing, beauty and grooming items and hair and makeup services to homeless people in Los Angeles — refers to members of the homeless communities she serves as kings and queens. It’s a reference to the movies she watched growing up, in which overthrown royals would get locked up in dungeons. “The king would be unshaven and unwashed, but when his subjects eventually found him, they would still bow to him,” she says. Those movies taught Raines a lesson she would carry with her throughout her life: “They can’t take away your status just because you lose your structure.” And Raines knows first-hand what it feels like to lose everything.
At the age of 10, she became involved with gangs in her hometown of Compton. And when she was in her early 20s, while homeless and pregnant, her son Demetrius tragically passed away just days before his third birthday. After his passing, she “became a member of the walking dead,” Raines says. “I couldn’t face myself in the mirror.” She started wearing makeup to mask her pain. “If I drew my eyebrows high enough, nobody could tell I was frowning,” she says. “If my eyes were red from applying eyeliner, no one would know I’d actually been crying.” She suffered for years with anxiety and panic attacks; finally, Raines’s twin sister pulled her aside and told her that her son wouldn’t have wanted her to live like this.
It was the motivation Raines needed to make a change. She was inspired to join a volunteer group with her local church, where she helped put together bags of food for the homeless. While she was handing out food, women would compliment Raines’s makeup. “I’d respond: ‘You want me to…
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