North Carolina-based nonprofit Homefront Room Revival is making its way to Hampton this holiday season to serve selected military families with its “Dec’ the Deployment” program.
Kate Tinsley, the organization’s founder and president, said she’ll be in town the week of Dec. 9 to “furnish holiday hope” by assisting families of deployed service members in decorating their homes for the season during a time they may be “in need of outreach and support.”
“The stories that really capture us are those families that are really struggling through deployments…traditionally, they’re trying to pull themselves together to do it for their kids,” she said. “It’s one act of kindness of just showing up with some friends to help do that with them can help pull somebody out of a tough time.”
Maybe one or two of Tinsley’s team members will travel with her to Hampton so for the time she’s here, she’s hoping to gather military-affiliated volunteers who can help decorate the chosen homes but also that this team is the start of the Joint Base Langley-Eustis chapter of the organization.
After a DIY class she hosted here in October booked-out in two days via Facebook and garnered a 20 person waitlist, Tinsley said branching out to Langley proved to be the obvious next step.
Established in 2016 inside Tinsley’s garage, Homefront Room Revival seeks to provide “decorating therapy” to self-referred military families who are struggling, for one reason or another, to make their empty house, a home.
Once a young Airman attempting to settle down with her husband in their first home in military base-housing, Tinsley admitted they overextended themselves and went into debt buying furniture — “something people don’t realize a lot of military go through when they’re low ranking,” she said.
After finding out she was pregnant with her second child around the same time her husband would set out on a year-long deployment, Tinsley admitted that at the time, she was “going through some mental health stuff” and when the holiday season approached, putting up a Christmas tree and decorations was the last thing on her mind.
That’s until she found solace through the arts.
“I started going back to what I originally found as a hobby…thrifting for furniture and this thing called ‘curb-alert,'” she said. “I started picking up old furniture left on the curb in between [other military family] moves and re-purposing it for myself.”
Grown from and still funded by grassroots social media groups, Tinsley said Dec’ the Deployment and Homefront Room Revival are filling a resource gap some may not have realized existed — the feat has earned her Air Force-wide recognition as 2019’s Armed Forces Insurance Air Force Spouse of the Year.
Tinsley referenced one referral that read: If you guys can’t do this for me, do you know of any other organizations that may be able to help me get my stuff out of the garage?
“There are none. That doesn’t exist,” she said. “So I think this is also changing the tone in the way that support services are viewed.”
Bringing together a team to decorate homes while inviting others in for DIY projects at the organization’s studio at Seymore Johnson, Tinsley said during the holidays, or times of tradition, the group also offers a sense of kinship when life’s circumstances can make someone feel isolated.
“It’s a vehicle to drive human connections and community together…it’s an innovative tool to drive in-person connections,” she said.
While Tinsley expects to close out holiday referrals and choose the families in Hampton who’ll benefit by Friday, she also said “it wouldn’t hurt” for people to send in their submissions up to the days before Christmas.
For more information about Homefront Room Revival or to submit a referral for Dec’ the Deployment, click here.
