Imagine being in a situation where your entire life is turned upside down. You are taken from your home for your own safety into a new environment. The Golden Girls Group Home is a haven for girls that find themselves in such situations. Located in Ceredo, West Virginia, the Golden Girls Home is licensed to house 24 girls from ages 12-18. The home specializes in girls only. Girls who have been neglected or abandoned, but specializes in helping girls recover from sexual abuse cases.

Judy Gilkerson founded the home 30 years ago to fulfill a need in the state; the need to give girls a safe, normal place that is as close to a home as possible. Nikki Thomas, the Home’s Advancement Director, said they go to great lengths to make sure the girls feel comfortable.

“When the girls come here they live, they go to school, the bus picks them up in the front,” Thomas said.

The home stretches down a block of B Street in Ceredo, but there is no sign, no indication to show that this is a special place where lives are being changed, helped and saved. No multi-story buildings, just a simple group of houses to make the transition into new life easy for the girls seeking a change.

“We want to make sure they have a home experience. We don’t want to make them feel like they are in an institution or anything, we are their family,” Thomas said.

The houses vary in occupancy from 4 girls to 10. One of the houses is designed with 5 rooms on the bottom floor and 5 on the top. The Golden Group Home, according to Thomas, is known for the quality of services they offer.

When they turn 18, the Home helps girls go to college through a transitional living program. Thomas said it’s a big deal for the girls to graduate from college, so they may become self-sufficient and feel a sense of accomplished.

“We’ve had girls graduate from Marshall in social work and now they are off doing the same work they needed themselves,” Thomas said.

The Home set aside a specific house for those who choose to stay and continue in the transitional living program. The 4 girls currently enrolled in college live together in the house and Thomas said this gives them a “dorm-like” feel.

The girls all have their own room. Each room has a different theme, a bed and a desk for schoolwork. Each of the girls puts their own special flair into their room.

“They have little living environments in each house, like little cultures,” Thomas said.

The Home helps girls find work either immediately or when they grow a little older, they take girls to Marshall games, to movies and get them to any after school activities they want to be involved in.

The girls’ backgrounds vary, but Thomas said she sees the biggest struggle for them is positive self image. These girls may constantly be struggling with typical teenage girl issues on top of the harsh situations life has thrown at them.

“I think they struggle with their identities, as far as being confident, because of diverse situations they’ve been through were not of any fault of their own,” Thomas said.

The Home has produced many success stories through its 30 some years. Current staff once lived and grew up in the program themselves. Now they lend a helping hand to girls going through the same hurt times as they did. The Home’s first girl went through the program and went on to become a neonatal nurse and now has a family of her own. According to Thomas she even changed her name to Gilkerson, after the founder of the program.

“There is a key phrase the Executive Director, Renee Harrison, made up,” Thomas said. ‘”It’s ‘Once a Golden Girl, always a Golden Girl'”.

Abi Black can be contacted at [email protected]