Hope's Doors St Charles Upd -

“I’m not fixing the building,” he says with a half-smile. “I’m fixing the door that was opened for me.”

To the casual passerby, it looks like an old storefront or a converted parish hall. But to the hundreds who have knocked, wept, or stumbled through those doors over the past seven years, it is the threshold between despair and a new beginning. Sister Margaret “Maggie” Delacroix, 68, is the heartbeat behind Hope’s Doors. A former trauma nurse turned lay chaplain, she opened the center in 2017 after noticing a gap in St. Charles’ social safety net. hope's doors st charles

“We had food banks. We had shelters for domestic violence. But we didn’t have a place where someone could simply say, ‘I’m lost,’ and be met with, ‘Come in, let’s figure it out,’” she says, pouring coffee into a chipped ceramic mug. “I’m not fixing the building,” he says with